North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered nationwide ‘lockdown’ measures after the country detected its first ever case of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, state media reported on Thursday 12 may. Kim Jong Un “called on all cities and counties across the country to carefully confine their territories and organize labor and production after isolating each work unit, each production unit and each dwelling unit from each other to block the spread of the “malicious virus”, the official KCNA news agency said. After two years of fighting the pandemic, samples taken from feverish patients in Pyongyang “coincide with the Omicron BA.2 variant”, the official KCNA news agency reported. “For Pyongyang to publicly admit cases of Omicron, the public health situation must be serious,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
Seoul-based NK News, citing sources in Pyongyang, reported that neighborhoods in the North Korean capital had been locked down for two days, also reporting panic buying. Experts say the country’s flawed healthcare system would struggle to cope with a major outbreak, especially since North Korea has failed to vaccinate any of its 25 million people, having rejected offers of vaccinations from WHO, China and Russia. Accepting vaccines through the WHO’s Covax program requires “transparency about how vaccines are distributed,” Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, told AFP, “c That’s why North Korea rejected it.”
