North Korea confirmed its first COVID-19 outbreak on Thursday, calling it the “most serious national emergency” and ordering a nationwide lockdown, with state media reporting that an Omicron variant had been detected in Pyongyang.
The first public admission of COVID infections highlights the potential for a major crisis in a country that has refused to accept international help with vaccination and has closed its borders.
As of March, no cases of COVID-19 have been reported, according to the World Health Organization, and there is no official record of any North Koreans having been vaccinated.
“There has been the largest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, which has been kept safe for the past two years and three months since February 2020,” the official KCNA news agency said, referring to detected cases of a highly transmissible subvariant of the Omicron virus, also known as BA.2.
The report says that people in Pyongyang had contracted the Omicron variant, without providing details on the number of cases or possible sources of infection. Samples from infected people were collected on May 8, he said.
The report was released as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was chairing a Workers’ Party meeting to discuss responses to the first outbreak of the coronavirus.
Kim ordered all cities and counties across the country to “strictly lock down” their regions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and said emergency reserve medical supplies would be mobilized, according to KCNA.
“The state epidemic prevention work will be changed to the maximum emergency epidemic prevention system,” KCNA said.
Although North Korea has never confirmed a single coronavirus infection in the country before, officials in South Korea and the United States have cast doubt, especially as cases of the Omicron variant were widely reported in neighboring South Korea and China.
The isolated north has enforced strict quarantine measures, including border lockdowns, since the pandemic began in early 2020. In July that year, Kim declared an emergency and imposed a lockdown on Kaesong, near the inter-Korean border, for three weeks. after a man who defected to the South in 2017 returned to the city with coronavirus symptoms.
According to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO), 64,207 of the more than 24.7 million inhabitants of North Korea have received the COVID-19 test; all had tested negative as of March 31.
North Korea has rejected vaccine shipments from the global COVID-19 vaccine exchange program COVAX and China’s Sinovac Biotech vaccine, suggesting that no civilians may have been vaccinated.
South Korea’s presidential office told Reuters that President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was sworn in on May 10, will continue to separate humanitarian aid from the political situation, opening the door for support to the North.
Thursday’s KCNA report said Kim told the Workers’ Party meeting that the purpose of the latest emergency quarantine system is to stably control and manage the spread of the coronavirus and quickly cure infected people to eliminate the source. transmission in the shortest period.
The fact that Kim called a party politburo meeting at dawn and state media immediately published the deliberation shows the urgency of the situation, said Professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korea Studies in Seoul.
“Externally, there may be an indirect message of the need to cooperate with the international community if it proves difficult to overcome alone,” Yang added.
A South Korea-based website that monitors activities in Pyongyang said this week that residents have been told to go home and stay indoors due to a “national problem,” without offering details.
Earlier on Thursday, Chinese state television reported that North Korea has required its people to stay home since May 11 as many of them have “suspicious flu symptoms,” without referring to COVID-19. .
The main crossing between China’s Dandong and North Korea’s northwestern city of Sinuiju was closed in April due to the COVID situation in the Chinese city, China said.
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