COVID-19 Threat: Nepal Government Cancels ‘Visit Nepal 2020’

With the growing threat of coronavirus ‘pandemic’ across the world, the Nepali Government has officially canceled the ambitious ‘Visit Nepal Year (VNY) 2020’ campaign.

The decision was formally endorsed at the recent meeting of the Council of Ministers on March 22, 2020.

Similarly, the government has also decided to dissolve VNY Secretariat from April 13, 2020.

Earlier, the Nepali Government canceled all the international promotional activities related to the tourism campaign in view of rapid coronavirus outbreak globally.

However, the Nepali Tourism Board decided to focus on domestic tourism while finding alternative markets to make up the tourism loss from China.

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But as the coronavirus outbreak turned pandemic, the government has decided to cancel the VNY campaign.

The Nepali Government has launched the ‘Visit Nepal 2020’ campaign with much fanfare on January 1, 2020 with an aim to attract 2 million foreign tourists.

The government even carried out promotional activities across 100 countries.

Even though there are no significant numbers of coronavirus infection cases in Nepal, the tourist influx dropped drastically as the country is at high risk of coronavirus outbreak.

So far, Nepal has reported only five coronavirus cases and one among them has already recovered.

The coronavirus has impacted every country in the world and has infected 859,800 people while claiming 42,340 lives.