The regime, which avoids talking about the coronavirus, will keep Pyongyang closed until Sunday and residents will have to monitor their temperatures daily
Five months after North Korea claimed to have eradicated Covid-19, it has ordered a five-day confinement in the country’s capital Pyongyang over the plethora of “respiratory illnesses” among civilians. In addition to staying home from today through Sunday, the population must undergo daily body temperature checks. The North Korean authorities are omitting whether their warning is due to the coronavirus: they have only mentioned the common flu, without giving any other health information.
Rumors of the closure of the capital, with three million inhabitants, started circulating days ago, so thousands of people had already stocked up on food. The scenes in supermarkets are reminiscent of those of the first year of the global pandemic.
The measures were announced amid a wave of extreme cold sweeping the country. In the capital, the temperature drops to minus 22 degrees Celsius, reports the newspaper ‘NK News’.
The North Korean government has been systematically minimizing the existence of coronavirus outbreaks on its territory. A few weeks ago, it drastically scaled back its relations with China, which came into the eye of the hurricane due to a new outbreak of infections early this year. President Kim Jong-un’s cabinet has banned all cross-border exchanges, including trade.
According to the country’s authorities, North Koreans would have remained free of the virus from the start of the global epidemic in 2020 until 2022, a claim that has been repeatedly questioned by the scientific community and which Western experts have attributed to the secrecy of their government, which announced the first peak of infection in April last year. In August, he assured that he had already put the outbreak behind him. “A miracle”. That’s what the experts called the hypothetical fact that the pandemic in the north had lasted only three months in a region that was reluctant to vaccinate and with a poor health system. From the beginning, the regime has chosen to refer to people with “fever” on many occasions.
Last November, after a strong vaccination campaign, the population was already able to take to the streets without a face mask or the other mandatory protective measures against the virus. Kim Jong-un boasted about the fight against covid. With only 4.8 million infections and 74 deaths, while the population is 25 million people, North Korea is among the least affected countries in the world, according to the president. Despite this, he ordered the confinement of the capital this Wednesday.
Source: La Verdad
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