Two Nepals in the Death Zone
“It is estimated around 6% of cases become critically ill. By this point the body is starting to fail and there is a real chance of death…. the immune system is now spiralling out of control and causing damage throughout the body. It can lead to septic shock when the blood pressure drops to dangerously low levels and organs stop working properly or fail completely. Acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by widespread inflammation in the lungs stops the body getting enough oxygen it needs to survive.”
“In the death zone, climbers’ brains and lungs are starved for oxygen, their risk of heart attack and stroke is increased, and their judgement quickly becomes impaired.”
- Aylin Woodward in businessinsider.com
Scrolling down through my Facebook feed these days all too often results in my seeing juxtaposed posts relating to Nepal. One chronicles the latest news from Everest Base Camp (EBC) as, step by step, the Khumbu Icefall ladders and the ropes to the summit are put in place, the other consists of pleas for help for a loved one—an elderly father, a diabetic sister, a cherished child—struggling to breathe due to Covid-19 and in desperate need of a hospital bed, a ventilator.
The contrast is too great, too extreme. My mind struggles to cope, to accept these two polar opposites. How can they co-exist? How can these be the two faces of a single country?
If there is any link between them, then it is this: both the climbers, who have paid anything in excess of $50,000 for the privilege of summiting the highest mountain on our planet where the oxygen saturation (SaO2) in the body (normally 98-99%) can fall to as low as 40%, and the patients suffering from a severe attack of Covid-19 are in Death Zone: both are dependent on oxygen canisters for their very survival.
But the expedition team members have made a conscious decision to brave such harsh conditions whereas patients finding themselves at death’s door are there through no fault of their own.
Nepal’s battle with its first wave of Covid-19 caused the much-lauded Visit Nepal 2020 campaign to crumble along with the hopes and dreams of many thousands of people working in the trekking and expedition sectors. Agency owners, guides and porters, seemed to have been surprisingly successful, in spite of the government’s mish-mash policies and the people’s growing boredom.
Lockdowns and so-called ‘loose-downs’ led to a lackadaisical attitude to masks, social distancing and hand hygiene. To the surprise of even the experts, after reaching a daily caseload peak of 5,743 on 21 October, right at the start of the back-to-back festivals of Dasain and Tihar, instead of soaring out of control as expected, the numbers of daily infections started to slowly decrease. Throughout February and March this year they remained either in double-digits or the low one-hundreds.
Few tourists filtered back to Nepal for the 2020 autumn season after the international airport, closed for so many months to all but repatriation and charter flights, reopened. The tourism sector started to pin its hopes on Spring 2021.
Many trekking agencies, in critical financial straits, encouraged their regular and prospective clients to come and enjoy trails that were less crowded than usual. However, most potential travellers were wary, all too aware of the risks involved. They were perhaps deterred by the lack of visa on arrival and the protocols, or simply bound by their own countries’ travel restrictions and economic malaise.
The major exception to this overall hesitancy and reluctance to travel to Nepal was the expedition sector. The Nepal government opened registration for the Spring climbing season, a major source of revenue, actively encouraging teams to come.
And they came (primarily) for Everest itself, or for any of the country’s myriad major mountaineering challenges, like Annapurna I and Dhaulagiri, both among our planet’s fourteen eight-thousanders.
This policy contrasted starkly with that of neighbouring China: for the Spring expedition season only Chinese were to be allowed to climb the north face of Everest which straddles the border of Nepal and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region.
And amazingly Nepal’s tactic worked: more than 400 climbers joining over 40 expeditions are on the mountain this season. More than 150 have already made it to the summit and there were two fatalities on 12 May.
This is the busiest year ever on the mountain, even exceeding 2019 when, unthinkably, there were queues of climbers staying dangerously long in the Death Zone as they waited their turn to get to the summit.
Most overseas expedition members started to arrive in Nepal towards the end of March, allowing them sufficient time for team-building and acclimatisation activities before making their final summit bids, the traditional ‘weather window’ for this usually occurring in the third quarter of May. It was at this precise point that things started to go awry in India, with the inevitable knock-on effect in Nepal.
India, like Nepal, seemed to have been able to control its first wave of Covid and figures remained in a beguiling trough throughout February, even dropping to below 10,000 cases per day. Then, inexplicably, a change set in and numbers started to inexorably rise, crossing the 100,000 cases per day mark on 4 April.
Coincidentally or otherwise, this was the fourth official day of the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar, attended by an estimated 9 million Hindu pilgrims and now dubbed a ‘super spreader event’. Nepal's former King Gyanendra Shah and Queen Komal Shah were among those who tested positive after returning from the festival to Kathmandu.
As the alarming increase in figures continued and many countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the traditional employment bases for Indian labourers, started to ban flights from Delhi, many thousands of Indians rushed to transit in Kathmandu, taking advantage of a gaping administrative loophole and completing their formalities at the Indian Embassy before catching their onward flights.
At the same time, Indian pilgrims flocked to the remote Nepal region of Mustang, largely Covid-free throughout the first wave, to pray at the holy temple in Muktinath and enjoy the hot springs at Tatopani.
Meanwhile, just as most expeditions were hunkered down at EBC, the daily case figure in Nepal started to increase, crossing the thousand mark on 18 April (compared with almost 274,000 in India that day). It continued to rise exponentially, resulting in lockdown being imposed on 29 April and both domestic and international flights being grounded in early May.
As the situation in the Kathmandu Valley in particular became increasingly serious, alarming reports of Covid-19 cases started to come from first EBC and then Dhaulagiri Base Camp.
Climbers were initially thought to be suffering from HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema), which is a life-threatening accumulation of fluid in the lungs that can occur even in otherwise healthy people at high altitude.
It was only after being air-lifted to Kathmandu and PCR-tested that the correct diagnosis of Covid-19 were made. The symptoms of HAPE and Covid-19 are eerily, and dangerously, similar: low oxygen levels, acute difficulty in breathing, fever and lung fluid.
Although reports continued to filter in of Covid-19 at Base Camps, and climbers are evacuated, some climbers’ personal blogs severely critical of the lax attitude being taken towards Covid-prevention both in the individual team camps and communal areas. Invariably, social media posts by the team leaders themselves completely ignored the issue.
The idolised Nirmal Purja, aka Nims dai, who had catapulted to fame last year for breaking records and climbing all 14 eight-thousanders in seven months, followed by the controversial first-ever winter ascent of K2, made self-aggrandising posts of his prowess and skills, accompanied by glossy, model-boy photos.
These were greeted by his adoring fans with sycophantic comments of ‘hero’ and ‘awesome’ even while one of his Elite Expedition team members fell victim to Covid-19. What a change from the modest man who, in Autumn 2020, had cancelled his Everest and Manaslu expeditions, publicly stating, ‘we do not find it ethical to run the expedition with the risks of more transmission, jeopardising the safety of our clients as well as the local community’.
What had happened to that admirable sense of ethics? Had it been submerged by an inflated ego? Or was he under intense political pressure to toe the line?
In the early evening of Friday, 7 May the Sherpa rope-fixing team reached the summit of Everest. Among them was Kami Rita Sherpa, marking his record-breaking 25th summit. Nepal’s Covid-19 caseload for that same day crossed the 9,000 mark, the active case count crossing 80,000, with a positivity rate of over 40% in the Valley, as high as 70% in Banke.
Facebook groups like the Nepal Covid-19 Support Group started being inundated with requests for help, advice, and above all for life-giving oxygen.
If the situation on Everest were not already bizarre enough, then the following Reuters report added the final touch: ‘China will set up “a line of separation” at the summit of Mount Everest to prevent the mingling of climbers from COVID-hit Nepal and those ascending from the Tibetan side as a precautionary measure ... It was not immediately clear how the line would be enforced on the summit, a tiny, perilous and inhospitable area the size of a dining table…. A group of 21 Chinese nationals are en route to the summit on the Tibetan side.”
On 9 May Tourism Mail, under the headline, ‘No Infections on Everest: Tourism Ministry’, reported the official denial that Covid-19 had been detected at EBC: ‘The Ministry has urged one and all not to entertain and disseminate unreliable and unverified information, creating fears among members in expedition teams and their families and just to follow the information provided by official sources.’
It seemed that in this complete denial of reality and desperate attempt at deception, the last straw of decency and honesty had irrevocably snapped.
Now I am left wondering how those Nepalis who have lost their loved ones to Covid-19 will feel as the first ‘real’ conquests of Everest on its ‘strictly separated summit’ by wealthy climbers rather than largely anonymous Sherpas started being announced this week—knowing that the feats have been achieved with the aid of supplementary oxygen.
The Bahraini Royal Guard team was first up there at 06:00 on 11 May, and many have followed since. And how will those summiteers feel on their return to Kathmandu, to find a city being ravaged by Covid, a severe oxygen shortage ... and no flights home.
A native of the UK and resident of Thailand, Lesley D Junlakan has been a frequent visitor to Nepal. She was in Kathmandu for most of 2020 and is currently locked down in Budhanilkantha where she spends her time writing and learning Nepali.
