The good news is that the Oli government has withdrawn the two controversial ordinances it had introduced four days ago on Monday. The two ‘surprise’ ordinances - one to amend the Political Party Act so as to ease splits in political parties and the other to amend the Constitutional Council Act in order to allow the Constitution Council to conduct meetings even in the absence of the main opposition leader – have been withdrawn. Following a Cabinet decision on Friday, President Bidya Bhandari announced the repeal of the ordinances as swiftly as she had certified them within a couple of hours of receiving them from the government.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has affected the lives of millions of people globally. In December 2019, Chinese public health authorities reported several cases of acute respiratory syndrome in Wuhan. The disease is now called COVID-19, and the causative virus is named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2). It is a replacement strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across Nepal have been closed since March 19 and it is not clear when they will open. They could remain closed for many more days. The major challenge at this point is to ensure that all children have access to education. Many experts have expressed their opinions on the issue. Some favor online teaching methods while others opine that Nepal is not yet ready for online teaching. It is important to be clear regarding the availability of radio, mobile phone, television, computer and internet facilities as well as the current use and possibility of digital learning materials and software while discussing the matter.

While hundreds of millions of people are put under strict quarantine measures across the world, China, which was the epicenter of the initial outbreak, is gradually lifting inter-cities travel bans and revamping mobility in the streets. The “Chinese model” of applying strict measures to contain virus spread, which was initially deemed unpopular, is now being implemented across democracies like the United States, India, or even Nepal with strict enforcement.

A couple of days back, we were watching a documentary on the Buddha. The narrator was describing how the Buddha challenged the hierarchy based on caste. Since my daughter has no knowledge around the caste system, she was stunned to find that the religion/culture that she was born into divides people up right at birth.

BEIJING – The COVID-19 coronavirus poses a threat on a scale not seen since the so-called Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people in 1918-19. To confront the pandemic, many governments have imposed stay-at-home orders and even strict lockdowns, bringing the global economy nearly to a standstill. But the real solution to this crisis is not containment. It is innovation.

When I was a college student in the early 1990s, the daily bus ride was fun and oftentimes a curious event. Among the regular beggars, singers and pickpockets encountered in the buses and bus terminals were the hawkers for newspapers, cheap magazines, and booklets. They would mix the names and surnames of the people in petty news and try to create the name of a leader or a celebrity. Then they would shout about the fabricated event. If they shouted 'Bhattarai is dead’, people would buy their stuff and would end up realizing that someone called Bhattarai had died in a hospital or a road accident. They mixed common events such as death, marriage, divorce, and illness with the names of the bigwig to create a sensation. But the prospective reader first thought about some big personality and bought the item. By the time they realized, the hawker would have exited the bus and the bus itself would be 3-4 stations down the route. An example of classic, non-digital, pre-internet, pre-social media fake news.

The coronavirus pandemic has completely engulfed the world. The United States is now the epicenter of the crisis. The worldwide shutdowns necessary to contain the spread of the virus has been quite detrimental to the global economy. What is good for public health has been devastating for economies around the world. In the United States, about 17 million people, more than 10 percent of the labor force, filed for unemployment claims during the month of March. Canada sheds more than one million jobs in March, which represents almost five percent of the country’s labor force. The statistics are unavailable for Nepal but if it were, it would be damning for the economy. Since there is no public provision for lost income in Nepal, there are no estimates to rely on to quantify the labor market effects of the economic shutdown.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing Nepalis to rethink the path of development. We are entering a new reality of frequent global pandemics and of ensuing recessions in which each society must seek to meet its own basic needs. At this time, there is a lot that we Nepalis can learn from the way we have, until just recently, been.

With now almost four months, the corona pandemic has resulted in over 100 thousand deaths. The modeling based on a number of tests and recovery data to date indicates some positive trend of recovery but it has not been very effective. The world focused on isolation measures, developing drugs and vaccines but various other options. Let me talk about those options. Vaccination is an ultimate cure as it helps the body to make an antibody to fight virus attacks. Scientists were able to quickly sequence the genetic materials of COVID-19 as early as in January and manipulate its gene sequence to develop a vaccine. A vaccine developed earlier for corona epidemics—SARS in 2002-04 and Mers in 2012—was never used as the virus was contained. These vaccines are now being trialed against COVID-19 by Novavax company and ready for human trials this spring. A biotech firm Moderna also claims that their vaccine will go for clinical trial soon in Australia. China is also on the race to try its own vaccine for clinical trials. A vaccine needs testing in animals first and then in humans in three-phase trials for approval. Thus it could cost several hundred million dollars.