North Korea has now imposed a nationwide lockdown to control its first acknowledged Covid-19 outbreak of the pandemic.
For more than two years It has held a widely doubted claim of a perfect record of keeping out the virus
The size of the outbreak was not immediately known, but it could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated.The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of samples collected on Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the Omicron variant.
He said ‘single-minded public unity is the most powerful guarantee that can win in this anti-pandemic fight’, according to KCNA. Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, said the isolated country will likely double down on lockdowns, even though the failure of China’s ‘zero-Covid’ approach suggests that does not work against the fast-moving Omicron variant.
North Korea’s previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic. The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and US-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile programme, pushing Mr Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.
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