Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
NKorea acknowledges 6 dead after admitting COVID-19 outbreak
SEOUL, South Korea — Six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread “explosively” across North Korea, state media said Friday, a day after the country acknowledged a COVID19 outbreak for the first time in the pandemic.
North Korea likely doesn’t have sufficient COVID19 tests and said it didn’t know the cause of the mass fevers. But a big coronavirus outbreak could be devastating in a country with a broken health care system and an unvaccinated, malnourished population.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency said of the 350,000 people who developed fevers since late April, 162,200 have recovered. It said 18,000 people were newly found with fever symptoms on Thursday alone, and 187,800 are being isolated for treatment.
One of the six people who died was infected with the omicron variant, KCNA said. But it wasn’t immediately clear how many of the total illnesses were due to COVID-19.
North Korea imposed a lockdown Thursday after acknowledging its first COVID-19 cases. Those reports said tests from an unspecified number of people came back positive for the omicron variant.
It’s unusual for isolated North Korea to admit to the outbreak of any infectious disease, let alone one as menacing as COVID-19, as it’s intensely proud and sensitive to outside perception about its self-described “socialist utopia.”
While North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had occasionally been candid about his worsening economy and other problems, he had repeatedly expressed confidence about pandemic response and wasn’t seen wearing a mask in public until Thursday.
The spread of the virus may have been accelerated by a massive military parade on April 25. Kim gave a speech and showcased his army and weaponry in front of tens of thousands of people.
Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at South Korea’s Sejong Institute, said the pace of the fever’s spread suggests the crisis could last months and possibly into 2023, causing major disruption in the poorly equipped country.
Haitians dying at sea:
Haitians are fleeing in greater numbers to the neighboring Dominican Republic, where they board rickety wooden boats painted sky blue to blend with the ocean to try to reach Puerto Rico — a trip in which 11 Haitian women drowned this week, with dozens of other migrants believed missing.
U.S. authorities said they have detained twice the number of migrants in and around U.S. jurisdictions in the Caribbean in the past year compared with a year earlier.
“We’ve seen our Haitian numbers explode,” said Scott Garrett, acting chief patrol agent for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Puerto Rico.
Garrett and others say Haiti’s political instability, coupled with brutal gang violence and a crumbling economy, have prompted people to flee, with more doing so via the Dominican Republic. Both countries share the island of Hispaniola, which lies west of Puerto Rico, with a treacherous area known as the Mona Passage separating the two.
In the most recent capsizing spotted on Thursday, 11 bodies of Haitian women were found and 38 people rescued — 36 of them Haitians and two from the Dominican Republic. Authorities say one of those rescued was charged with human smuggling. Dozens are believed missing.
Garrett said it’s unclear exactly how many migrants were aboard the boat, but said survivors provided authorities with their own estimates of somewhere between 60 and 75.
Red moon this weekend: A total lunar eclipse will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual thrills for stargazers across North and South America.
The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about 1½ hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade. It will be the first so-called blood moon in a year.
Observers in the eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America will have prime seats for the whole show, weather permitting.
Deadly fire in India: A massive fire erupted Friday evening in a four-story commercial building in New Delhi, killing at least 27 people and leaving several others injured, a fire control room official said.
Dozens of people were rescued from the building, which contains mainly shops, the control room said.
The Press Trust of India news agency said 12 people suffered burns in the fire and 50 were evacuated from the building.
The casualties occurred on the second floor of the building, where inflammable plastic material used for manufacturing equipment like security cameras was stored.
The Indian Express newspaper said two owners of a company selling security cameras were detained for questioning, as the fire reportedly started from their office.
Train attacker overpowered:
An off-duty police officer and two other passengers on a regional train in Germany overpowered a man born in Iraq who wounded five people including the officer with a knife on Friday, authorities said.
A top law enforcement official said the 31-year-old attacker had been investigated for possible Islamic extremism while living in a refugee hostel in 2017, but that the motive for the train attack hadn’t been determined.
Four of the injured were treated in hospital for wounds to their hands or face and head, while one victim had been stabbed in the shoulder blade. None were in life-threatening condition. The attacker was also injured and taken to a clinic.
Woman dragged 8 miles: Police in central California were searching for the driver of a pickup truck that struck a woman walking her dog Friday and kept going, dragging her more than 8 miles to a hotel parking lot, where she was found dead.
The 29-year-old woman, believed to be homeless, was pushing a shopping cart and had her dog on a leash when she was hit by a gray or silver pickup truck at an intersection in Fresno, said Fresno Police Lt. Bill Dooley.
The man kept driving with the woman trapped under his truck and stopped at a hotel, where he parked in the parking lot, got out of the pickup truck and went to the lobby to ask for a room, Dooley said.
When the man was told there was no vacancy, he left and was pulling back in his truck when another hotel guest saw the woman’s partial remains dislodge from under the pickup truck and called police, Dooley said.