National guideline for strengthening evidence generation on COVID-19

Abstract

Background : On 30th January, WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, due to COVID-19, initial infections detected in Wuhan in China On 11th March2020, WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a “pandemic". As of 24th May 2020, around 5,429,185 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 with 344,444 deaths and 2,259,877 recoveries have been reported severely affecting United States of America (USA), Brazil, Russia, Spain and United Kingdom with few thousand cases and few deaths in other countries. In Nepal, the first case was reported on 23rd January 2020. The cases of COVID-19 have increased logarithmically in the last three weeks, with 1572 cases, 220 recoveries and eight deaths as of 31st May 2020. Scattered evidence on various aspects of the disease epidemiology, characteristics of the virus and its transmission, symptomatic case management has been developed globally, where there are very high mortality However, the morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19 in Nepal is slow and low in comparison, which demands country specific research developing evidences for policy and strategy planning for early containment and mitigation of the effects at the earliest.