North Korea Declares State Of Emergency After Report Of First Suspected Case Of COVID-19

After an individual suspected of contracting COVID-19 returned to North Korea after crossing the border illegally this month from the neighboring South, state media, on Sunday, announced that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has called for an emergency meeting with top officials of the Politburo.

If confirmed, it will be the first case officially validated by North Korean officials, who have claimed so far that the hermit state has no reported cases of the highly contagious disease.

The Korean Central News Agency disclosed that Kim declared a state of emergency and ordered a lockdown on Kaesong's border area, calling it a critical situation in which the virus could be said to have entered the nation.

Based on the KCNA report, the COVID-19 infected person illegally entered the North through Kaesong City on July 19 after he defected to South Korea three years ago. An immediate medical checkup, following a thorough interrogation, was given to the patient and is, now, under isolation, along with others that he had come in contact with, KCNA disclosed.

The North's Central Military Commission will conduct a probe into military personnel who were accountable for the illegal entry of the patient and impose the corresponding punishment, the state news agency added.

North Korea had long claimed that it was free from the virus, although several health experts stressed that was practically impossible. The North shares a long stretch of the boundary with China, where the coronavirus is said to have first emerged. Though North Korea acted quickly to shut its border, activities across the boundary are largely informal and difficult to manage.

For its part, South Korea's health officials and the military are confirming the fact regarding the KCNA report and working closely with the concerned agencies, a military official said on Sunday. According to the official, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff is evaluating the country's military preparedness in order to get a clearer perspective of the reported infection from its neighbor.

North Korea has been the recipient of thousands of COVID-19 testing apparatuses from Russia and other nations and has carried out strict large-scale border shutdowns. Reports said that thousands of North Koreans have been quarantined, but prohibitions had recently been loosened.

Meanwhile, over 200 countries have reported cases of the coronavirus since the start of the outbreak in China. There have so far been almost 16 million infections confirmed around the globe, and over 640,000 have died from the pandemic.