North Korean President Kim Jong-Un has ordered a national lockdown as the country recorded its first outbreak of Covid-19, raising fears of humanitarian disaster in one of the world’s only unvaccinated countries.
State media reported an Omicron outbreak in the capital city of Pyongyang but did not state the number of people believed to be infected. The nuclear-armed country had never encountered any Covid-19 cases and ensured that it had tough restrictions on its borders since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Samples taken from patients sick with fever in Pyongyang have coincided with the Omicron variant, the official Korean Central News Agency reported. North Korean officials including Kim Jong-Un had a meeting on Thursday to discuss the outbreak and jointly decided to impose a national lockdown.
The state broadcaster reported that Kim Jong Un “called on all the cities and counties of the whole country to thoroughly lockdown their areas” with businesses, factories and homes closed down and reorganised “to flawlessly and perfectly block the spread vacuum of the malicious virus.”
Analysts said the admission to the Covid-19 outbreak by the North Korean leader is a sign of how severe the situation is, but that is not a sign that Kim will go out to look for assistance from the international community.
North Korea rejected offers of vaccines from the United Nations-backed initiatives, and aid workers warned that the country would struggle to handle a major outbreak due to its tightened restrictions.
Source: Al Jazeera, Eyewitness News, BBC News, The Guardian, The Washington Post, image from Aljazeera