North Korean state media confirms first Covid death

At least one person confirmed to have Covid-19 has died in North Korea, state media has announced, offering the first such statistics a day after the country confirmed its first outbreak since the pandemic began.

Some 187,800 people are being treated in isolation after a fever of unidentified origin has spread in the country since late April, the official KCNA news agency reported.

Around 350,000 people have shown signs of that fever, 162,200 of them treated so far, though KCNA did not specify how many had tested positive for Covid.

At least six people who showed fever symptoms died, with one of those cases confirmed to have contracted the Omicron variant of the virus, KCNA said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited the anti-virus command centre on Tuesday, a day after declaring the “gravest state emergency” and ordering a national lockdown.

Until then, the country had claimed it had not recorded a single Covid case since it closed its borders at the start of the pandemic more than two years ago.

The discovery of the Omicron variant presents a potentially serious risk to North Korea, which has not vaccinated any of its 25 million people, according to experts, and its poorly resourced healthcare system would also struggle to cope with a major outbreak.

The country so far has shunned vaccines offered by the UN-backed Covax distribution programme, possibly because administering the jabs would require international monitoring.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said the regime’s public acknowledgment of coronavirus cases meant “the public health situation must be serious”.

“This does not mean North Korea is suddenly going to be open to humanitarian assistance and take a more conciliatory line toward Washington and Seoul,” he said.