COVID-19 in Nepal: Final Tally, Waves Timeline & Vaccination

Nepal's Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) tracked the pandemic through the national COVID-19 dashboard at covid19.mohp.gov.np and daily situation updates from the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division (EDCD). As routine daily reporting was scaled back through 2022 and 2023, the cumulative figures effectively settled: Nepal had recorded on the order of one million confirmed cases and roughly 12,000 confirmed deaths. A well-defined mid-pandemic snapshot from 26 July 2022 listed 984,475 confirmed cases, 968,802 recoveries and 11,959 deaths, with the running total edging just past 1,000,000 cases and about 12,030 deaths in the years afterwards.

These are officially confirmed, laboratory-diagnosed figures and should be read as a floor rather than a true count of infections. Limited testing capacity, especially outside the Kathmandu Valley and during the surges of 2021, means many mild and asymptomatic infections were never recorded. Excess-mortality studies for Nepal suggest the real death toll was several times the confirmed number, a pattern seen across South Asia.

The confirmed case-fatality rate (CFR) stayed close to 1.2 percent for most of the pandemic. Nepal performed more than 5.8 million RT-PCR tests through around 40 laboratories by mid-2022, up from a single testing site (the National Public Health Laboratory in Teku, Kathmandu) at the very start. All numbers on this page are the officially reported figures with their reference dates; readers should treat them as a historical record, not live data.

Nepal confirmed South Asia's first case of COVID-19 on 23 January 2020 (Magh 2076 BS). The patient was a 31-year-old Nepali student who had returned to Kathmandu from Wuhan, China, on 9 January; his sample was sent abroad and returned positive. For nearly seven weeks Nepal recorded no further cases, and the second case was not confirmed until 23 March 2020, in a woman who had returned from Europe.

On 24 March 2020 the government imposed a nationwide lockdown, one of the earliest and longest in the region, suspending international flights (from 22 March) and halting most domestic movement. The first locally transmitted case was confirmed on 4 April 2020 in Kailali district in the far west, and the first death followed on 14 May 2020, a 29-year-old postpartum woman from Sindhupalchok. The initial lockdown formally ended on 21 July 2020 after almost four months, though localised prohibitory orders continued.

The first wave built slowly through the second half of 2020, driven heavily by migrant workers and students returning through the open border with India. Cases peaked around October 2020, straining hospitals in the Kathmandu Valley and the Tarai but remaining far below what would come in 2021. By the end of 2020 Nepal had recorded roughly 260,000 cases and about 1,800 deaths.

Nepal launched its national COVID-19 vaccination campaign on 27 January 2021 (Magh 2077 BS), among the first countries in South Asia to begin inoculation. The programme started with one million doses of Covishield (the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India), provided by India as a grant, and prioritised frontline health workers, sanitation staff, security personnel and, in a second phase, people aged 65 and above.

Supply, not demand, was the early constraint. When India halted vaccine exports during its own catastrophic Delta surge in spring 2021, hundreds of thousands of Nepalis who had received a first Covishield dose were left waiting months for their second. Nepal bridged the gap with China's Vero Cell (Sinopharm) vaccine and later doses from the COVAX facility and bilateral donors, gradually diversifying its portfolio.

Over the full campaign Nepal deployed a mix of vaccines, chiefly Covishield/AstraZeneca and Vero Cell (Sinopharm), alongside Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and China's CoronaVac (Sinovac). Later in 2022 and 2023 the country added booster doses and, in February 2023, received Pfizer's updated bivalent vaccine. Nepal was also noted as the first country in the Asia-Pacific to vaccinate refugees within its borders.

The second wave was Nepal's deadliest. Driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant (B.1.617.2) spilling over from India, cases exploded from late April 2021. The seven-day average of new cases peaked around 9,300 per day in mid-May 2021, roughly double the first-wave peak, while daily deaths reached as high as about 240 in a single day, close to a tenfold increase over October 2020.

The surge overwhelmed the health system. Hospitals in Kathmandu and across the country ran out of intensive-care beds, ventilators and, critically, medical oxygen; images of patients being treated on hospital floors and families scrambling for oxygen cylinders drew international attention. The government reimposed prohibitory orders (effectively local lockdowns) in the Kathmandu Valley and dozens of districts from late April 2021.

The Everest climbing season and cross-border movement amplified the spread. Delta remained the dominant strain through the second half of 2021 and accounts for the largest share of Nepal's total COVID-19 deaths. Cases receded through the summer and autumn of 2021 as restrictions held and vaccination coverage climbed.

Nepal's third wave, powered by the Omicron variant, was the fastest but far less lethal. After a quiet December 2021, cases surged in the first weeks of January 2022, rising from a few hundred a day to a peak above 10,000 confirmed cases per day around 20 January 2022. Test positivity spiked dramatically, at times reported in the 40 to 50 percent range, indicating that recorded cases badly undercounted true infections.

Despite record case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths during the Omicron wave were much lower than in the Delta wave, reflecting both the variant's milder profile and the protection built up by vaccination and prior infection. The wave crested quickly and, by late February 2022, daily cases had fallen sharply. Schools and offices that had shifted online reopened within weeks.

Smaller, low-mortality bumps in cases occurred later in 2022 as Omicron sub-variants circulated, but none approached the scale of the first three waves. By 5 May 2023 the World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a global public health emergency of international concern, and Nepal, like most countries, moved to treat it as an ongoing endemic respiratory illness rather than an emergency.

Nepal's vaccination campaign, slow to start because of supply shortages, accelerated sharply in late 2021 and 2022. By 16 January 2022 about 40 percent of the total population was fully vaccinated; by 3 February 2022 the fully vaccinated share had crossed half the population, with roughly 14.9 million people (about 51 percent) having received both doses and around 17.3 million (about 68 percent) having received at least one dose.

Coverage continued to rise through 2022. By February 2023 the MoHP reported that about 22.3 million people, or roughly 76 percent of the total population, were fully vaccinated. Counting all doses administered, including boosters and paediatric doses, Nepal had delivered on the order of 60 to 62 million doses by late 2023, equivalent to more than 200 doses per 100 people.

Coverage was highest in urban centres and the Tarai and lower in remote mountain districts, where terrain and cold-chain logistics slowed delivery. Nepal's relatively high final coverage, achieved despite an initial supply crisis, is widely regarded as a public-health success, built on an established childhood-immunisation system, thousands of female community health volunteers, and sustained international donations.

Every figure on this page is an officially reported, laboratory-confirmed number tied to a specific date, and each carries the limits of the system that produced it. Confirmed cases depend on how much testing was done; when positivity rates hit 40 to 50 percent during the Delta and Omicron peaks, it was clear that recorded cases captured only a fraction of real infections. Confirmed deaths, likewise, count only those who died after a positive test in a facility that reported it.

This is why researchers rely on excess-mortality estimates to gauge the pandemic's true burden, and those estimates place Nepal's real death toll well above the roughly 12,000 confirmed. For a durable historical record, the confirmed tallies remain the standard reference, but they should always be cited with their date and understood as a minimum.

For the original data, consult the MoHP COVID-19 dashboard and EDCD situation reports, WHO Nepal updates, and the compiled series at Our World in Data. Because Nepal has largely stopped daily COVID-19 reporting, the totals here are best treated as a settled historical snapshot rather than figures that will keep changing.