316 - Nepal's Growing COVID-19 Crisis
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2021
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nepal is suffering from a growing humanitarian crisis. Less than 4% of the country is vaccinated, test positivity rates are up to 60-90% in some areas, and outside of capital Kathmandu, ICU care is extremely hard to find. Binita Adhikari, executive director of Health Foundation Nepal, and Anup Subedee, an infectious disease physician in Kathmandu, talk with Josh Sharfstein about what contributed to Nepal's COVID-19 crisis and what the world needs to do to help. Please consider donating to one of these nonprofits: Health Foundation Nepal, America Nepal Medical Foundation, and the Nepal Development Society.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have |
| 0:33.9 | ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:39.0 | at jhh.edu. That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Today, our topic is Nepal, a country of 30 million people now experiencing one of the world's |
| 0:53.0 | worst COVID outbreaks with the impending |
| 0:55.6 | collapse of its health care system. I speak to Benita Adikari, the executive director of |
| 1:02.1 | Health Foundation Nepal, and a research associate in international health at Johns Hopkins. |
| 1:07.8 | Joining her is Dr. Anup Subadi, an infectious disease physician working in the capital |
| 1:13.8 | city of Kathmandu. Let's listen. Benita Adikari and Dr. Anub Subadi, thank you so much for joining me to talk |
| 1:23.5 | about the pandemic in Nepal. I think I'd like to start with you, Dr. Subidi. |
| 1:30.4 | Could you explain the current situation? |
| 1:33.2 | What is happening with COVID-19 right now? |
| 1:36.4 | So in Nepal, we are in the middle of the second wave. |
| 1:42.2 | The first wave lasted for at least eight, nine months. And we were kind of |
| 1:48.9 | at a plateau. And about a month ago, we started seeing more cases, rising in the number of cases. |
| 1:57.6 | And at this point, we are at the exponential phase of the curve. |
| 2:06.3 | And we have about 9,000 new cases yesterday reported by the government, |
| 2:14.6 | Minister of Health. And we have, uh, government and minister health and so this second wave seems to be mainly driven by the new variants |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.