North Korea claimed on Friday that the country’s first Covid outbreak began with patients touching “foreign things” near the border with South Korea, apparently shifting the blame to the neighbor for the spate of infections that plagued the isolated country. hit.
In announcing its survey results, the North ordered its people to “be vigilant in dealing with alien things that come through wind and other climatic phenomena and balloons in the areas along the demarcation line and borders.”
According to state media KCNA, an 18-year-old soldier and a five-year-old kindergartener who picked up the unidentified material in early April “in a hill around barracks and living quarters” in the eastern county of Kumgang showed symptoms and later tested. positive for coronavirus.
“The research results showed that several people who came to the capital from the Ipho-ri area in the Kumgang district of Kangwon Province in mid-April had a fever and a sharp increase in fever cases is among them. contacts seen, “KCNA said.
It is said that all other cases of fever reported in the country until mid-April were due to other diseases but it did not spread.
This comes when China began testing North Korea’s air for traces of Covid and encouraged people living along the border to close their windows on days with a southerly wind.
South Korea’s Ministry of Unification said on Friday there was “no possibility” that Covid would enter North Korea via contaminated balloons sent by activists in the South.
North Korean defectors and activists in South Korea have been flying balloons with pamphlets and humanitarian aid across the heavily fortified border for decades.
The government of former President Moon Jae-in banned the campaigns in 2020, citing security issues of residents at the border, but activists called the ban an attempt to whitewash Pyongyang and silence critics amid efforts to to improve cross-border ties.
North Korea fought its first outbreak of Covid infections, and declared a state of emergency in May after years of enforcing strict restrictions to prevent the virus from entering the country.
In July 2020, North’s leader Kim Jong Un declared a state of emergency and imposed a three-week lockdown on the city of Kaesong, near the inter-Korean border, after a man who crossed to the south in 2017 after the city returned with Covid symptoms.
The North claimed that the Covid wave showed signs of declining, although experts suspect underreporting in the figures released by government-controlled media.
North Korea reported 4,570 more people with fever symptoms on Friday, with the total number of fever patients recorded at 4.74 million since the end of April.
Pyongyang announced the number of fever patients daily without specifying them as Covid patients, apparently due to a lack of test kits.