Kim Jong-un orders lockdowns
NORTH Korea confirmed it had Covid19 cases for the first time yesterday and declared a “serious emergency”, with leader Kim Jong-un appearing in a mask on television for the first time to order nationwide lockdowns.
Hours after the announcement – the first time the nuclear-armed country has ever admitted to a case of Covid-19 – Seoul’s military said it had detected three short-range ballistic missiles fired from near Pyongyang.
The launch, one of more than a dozen sanctions-busting weapons tests so far this year, comes shortly after Washington warned that Kim’s regime could test a nuke any day, with satellite images indicating fresh activity at nuclear sites.
Earlier yesterday, North Korea said it had moved into “maximum emergency epidemic prevention system” after patients sick with fever in Pyongyang tested positive for the “omicron BA.2 variant” of Covid-19.
Kim, wearing a mask on state television for the first time, oversaw an emergency politburo meeting to discuss the outbreak and “called on all the cities and counties of the whole country to thoroughly lock down their areas”.
Kim told the meeting that the goal was to “quickly cure the infections in order to eradicate the source of the virus spread,” KCNA said, without specifying how many Covid-19 infections had been detected.
North Korea’s crumbling health infrastructure would struggle to deal with a major outbreak, with its 25 million people not vaccinated, experts say.
By following its admission of Covid-19 cases with a missile test, North Korea is signalling “coronavirus control and its pursuit of national defence are two separate things”, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.
“It is now reasonable to assume it could also conduct a nuclear test with Kim Jong-un’s green light at any
moment,” he added. “For Pyongyang to publicly admit to omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
“Pyongyang will likely double down on lockdowns, even though the failure of China’s zero-Covid-19 strategy suggests that approach won’t work against the omicron variant.”
North Korea has turned down offers of vaccinations from the World Health Organization, China, and Russia.
Accepting vaccines through the WHO’s Covax scheme “requires transparency over how vaccines are distributed”, said Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “That’s why North Korea rejected it.”