Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, North Korea had never officially announced cases of the disease in the country. This Thursday (12), for the first time, the national media admitted an outbreak of coronavirus and declared a “major national emergency”.
“A rupture has arisen on our front of emergency epidemic prevention that has been staunchly defended until now,” declared the official KCNA news agency. According to the statement, samples collected in the capital, Pyongyang, from people who had a fever showed a subvariant of the Omicron strain.
Despite making the first public admission about the disease, the official media has not announced the number of people infected. Since Tuesday (10), North Korea has imposed a lockdown. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un called a meeting of the Workers’ Party, ordering a “strict lockdown” across the country and the mobilization of emergency reserve medical supplies.
North Korea has ‘secret’ policy to control Covid-19
For more than two years, the dictator of North Korea has imposed severe restrictions to control the spread of the virus in the country, even travel between provinces. However, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), by the end of March, the Asian country had recorded just over 64,000 tests (in a population of 25 million) for Covid-19, all with negative results.
In addition, North Korea had refused to supply vaccines from China, even though it was eligible for the Covax global vaccine-sharing program. In February of this year, the laboratory reduced the number of doses allocated to the country, as it was unable to deliver any shipments.
Even without ever having officially announced the cases of Covid-19, last year Kim Jong Un warned about the “irresponsibility” of high-ranking officials. They were fired due to failure to comply with disease containment rules. According to the official agency, mistakes could lead to a “deadly and destructive disaster”, but the real situation in the country is unknown to the rest of the world.
Country raises alert as neighboring China experiences strong lockdown
Restrictions on movement in North Korea were enacted weeks after the country suspended a trade operation with China. The episode came after a spike in Covid-19 cases in Liaoning and Jilin provinces, which border Korea.
Similarly, China has recently imposed new movement restrictions in several regions, most strongly in Shanghai. The city is already in the sixth week of lockdowns, with more than 25 million people in extreme isolation. China’s lockdown policy goes against the measures adopted in most parts of the world, to reopen markets and restore personal freedoms. The new wave of stringent restrictions arrived after life seemed to have returned to normal in the country.
Last week, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping declared that he would not tolerate “acts that distort or deny the country’s epidemic prevention policies”. On Wednesday (11), Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian called the WHO irresponsible for considering China’s policy to control the coronavirus as “unsustainable”.
As the two Asian countries control the media and social networks, in addition to not declaring the real numbers of the pandemic, it is difficult to calculate the risks that the current situation in these countries generates for world health.
#time #years #North #Korea #admits #Covid #lockdown