The Emabssy of Nepal in London released a press release on Thursday disagreeing with the Daily Mail reporting of a claim of a new coronavirus variant emerging from Nepal. The Embassy categorically denied an existence of such a variant in Nepal and called this news baseless and requested for a correction to this misinformation.
The Daily Mail front page news on Thursday states “NEPAL VARIANT” THREAT TO OUR HOLIDAYS as an exclusive news but unfortunately Nepal as a country and WHO Nepal does not seem to be aware of any such variant detected or emerging from Nepal.
WHO(Nepal)
Daily Mail published the story saying the Nepal variant as been linked to over 20 people in the UK and that it was a mutated version of the variant found in India. This story has raised a lot of concern in Europe but was quickly debunked by the Nepal’s health ministry as just not true.
According to WHO there are currently only 3 confirmed coronavirus variants in circulation and they are “Alpha (B.1.1.7), Delta (B.1.617.2) and Kappa (B.1.617.1)”. Reacting to this news the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Population in Nepal, Dr Krishna Poudyal issued a press release refuting the claim of any such variant from Nepal and urged all media not to spread such misinformation. Dr Poudyal also stated that besides those three active variants of coronavirus, namely Alpha, Delta and Kappa there is no evidence of a new variant.
Nepal is currently placed on the UK government’s red travel list zone, which is for countries with high infections rates and troubling variants but Nepal’s Ministry of Health stated there are currently 6,828 new Covid cases taking the overall total to 576,836 since the start of coronavirus. The Ministry also stated that 81% of people that suffered from the disease have fully recovered.
