The government of North Korea confirmed the first coronavirus infections registered in its territory since the pandemic began in 2020. There is fear about the health situation because the country refused to import vaccines.
The national news agency North Korea KCNA reported that samples taken last Sunday from patients with a fever had tested positive for coronavirus. Specifically, infections correspond to the highly contagious variant Omicron BA.2. However, the Asian country did not specify how many cases would be treated.
the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, chaired a meeting of the Politburo of the Workers’ Party in which he was seen, for the first time since the start of the global health emergency, with a mask: he only took it off to speak. This meeting had the objective of activating an “epidemic prevention system of maximum emergency“.
Kim urged “all cities and municipalities in the country to carefully confine their areas,” according to what was reported by KCNA. Both homes, businesses and factories have to be closed “to impeccably block the spread of the malicious virus.”
Source: (RTVE)
“We will safely overcome the emergency and succeed with the emergency quarantine plan,” the North Korean leader said. However, the situation in North Korea worries.
North Korea today
The strategy carried out by Pyongyang It consists of completely closing the borders so that no one can enter the country and carefully disinfecting all imports It receives both by rail and by ship.
Now that the first outbreak has been detected, It is unlikely that North Korea can carry out a “zero COVID” strategy like Chinanot only because it does not have the logistics that its neighbor has, but because it already had to admit that it was experiencing food shortages linked, in addition to the closure of the borders, to the droughts and typhoons that hit it.
Even more, North Korea It is, together with Eritrea, the only country in the world that did not apply a single coronavirus vaccine to its inhabitants.. Pyongyang refused the shipment of AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines offered by the COVAX mechanism. Now, without an inoculated population, with a weak health system and a highly contagious variant, the North Koreans’ present looks dark.