North Korea officially confirmed this Thursday (12), still Wednesday night (11) in Brazil, the first cases of Covid-19 in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.
State media KCNA reported that authorities had detected an outbreak linked to the BA.2 subvariant of the omicron, the most transmissible strain of the coronavirus and responsible for large spikes in the disease in many countries earlier this year.
According to Reuters, the dictatorship is already talking about a “serious national emergency” and leader Kim Jong-un has determined isolation measures for part of the population.
Last June, two days after he told the WHO (World Health Organization) that there were no cases of Covid-19 in North Korea, the dictator fired several members of the Workers’ Party elite over a “serious incident” related to to the coronavirus, “which created a major crisis for the security of the country and its people”.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, North Korea, already considered the most closed country in the world, has 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 country’s already shaken humanitarian situation, although it is almost impossible to verify the government’s claim that North Koreans were free from contamination.
