NEW DELHI — For days, Nadeem Bhatti, a university student in Wuhan, China, watched as his foreign classmates fled the center of the coronavirus outbreak — lines of Indians, Americans and others filed somberly onto buses as their governments evacuated them from the hot zone.

But Mr. Bhatti, like hundreds of other Pakistani students, was left behind.

The Pakistani government has asked Mr. Bhatti and the 800 other Pakistani students in Wuhan to stay put, the result of a grim government calculus.

[Read: Coronavirus is forcing foreign students in China to choose: stay or go.]

Pakistan’s health care system is in shambles. Already strained hospitals lack trained doctors and supplies. If infected nationals return home, the virus would likely spread unabated across the country. Pakistan is one of the last places in the world still battling polio, and incidents of dengue fever and H.I.V. are on the rise.

“Believe me — at first I thought that we must go back because we could be infected by the virus,” said Mr. Bhatti, a 25-year-old civil engineering student at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. “Some nights I couldn’t sleep because of the stress.”