North Korea puts capital on lockdown after outbreak of ‘respiratory disease’

North Korean authorities have decreed a five-day lockdown in the country’s capital, Pyongyang, due to the increase in cases of a respiratory disease that has not been identified by the regime, it said on Tuesday night (24, Wednesday morning at local time) the South Korean agency NK News.

Without mentioning Covid-19, the North Korean regime reported that the city’s population should remain at home until Sunday (29). In some regions, residents will be subjected to temperature checks several times a day.

North Korea first acknowledged a Covid-19 outbreak in May last year, but a few months later, in August, the regime declared victory over the virus. The country did not say how many people were infected or died from the disease.

Instead, the dictatorship even announced a “serious national emergency”, with more than 4 million people affected by what it called a “fever” — the country has about 25 million inhabitants. Similar outbreaks have not been reported since last July.

In recent days, North Korean state media has strengthened measures to contain the spread of viruses and reduce respiratory illnesses, including the flu, but has yet to report on the new restriction in Pyongyang.

State news agency KCNA reported on Tuesday that the city of Kaesong, close to the border with South Korea, has intensified public communication campaigns for all workers to “voluntarily observe anti-epidemic regulations” in their workplaces.

In the pandemic, North Korea, already considered the most closed country in the world, isolated itself even more, banning all international travel, including to neighboring China and Russia, and restricting domestic travel. The objective was to prevent the entry of the coronavirus from further aggravating the already shaken humanitarian situation, although it is almost impossible to verify the claim, made by the government, that North Koreans were free of contamination.