South Korea has said a deserter who recently fled to the North does not appear to have contracted Covid-19, a day after Pyongyang imposed a lockdown near the border, alleging that the man was its first recorded case of the disease.
North Korean state media reported Sunday that the 24-year-old man, who was reportedly in quarantine, showed symptoms of coronavirus after returning to his homeland across the border that separated the two Koreas last week.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared a “maximum emergency” state and ordered the border city of Kaesong, where the deserter was discovered, to be locked up, the state news agency KCNA said.
KCNA did not say whether the man had been screened for Covid-19, but said “an uncertain result was obtained from various medical checks of that person’s organ secretion and blood from the upper respiratory tract,” leading to the officials to quarantine and investigate anyone with whom they have been in contact.
But on Monday, southern health authorities said there was no evidence that the defector had contracted the disease.
“The person is neither registered as a Covid-19 patient nor classified as a person who came into contact with patients with the virus,” Yoon Tae-ho, a senior health official, said at a press conference, according to the news agency. Yonhap.
The Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said two people who had been in close contact with the deserter were negative, Yoon said, according to Yonhap.
The South Korean military said the defector is believed to have swum into North Korea from the western border island of Ganghwa, the same route it took when it deserted three years ago, after passing under a barbed wire through from a drain to evade South Korean security guards.
Only a small number of the approximately 33,000 North Koreans who deserted south since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War return north. Some wanted to see their families before they died, while others have become disillusioned with life in the South, where they face discrimination in education and employment.
North Korea has not responded to South Korea’s claims that the defector, whom media reports have referred to only as “Kim,” does not have Covid-19.
Yonhap reported that the man had been investigated for the alleged rape of a female deserter last month.
South Korea managed to contain the virus in April through a combination of mass testing, tracing, and isolation, but has struggled to suppress smaller outbreaks in the Seoul metropolitan area since late May.
On Monday, the KCDC reported 25 new infections, bringing the country’s total to 14,175, with 299 deaths. The new cases included 16 among people who had recently arrived from abroad.
Until the weekend, North Korea insisted that it had not discovered a single case of Covid-19, a claim disputed by South Korean officials and some health experts.
According to KCNA, Kim Jong-un said Sunday at an emergency meeting of the ruling party’s politburo that “a critical situation” had developed “in which the vicious virus could be said to have entered the country.”
Some analysts believed that the North’s “admission” that the virus had finally arrived in the country could indicate that it needed help fighting the virus.
“It is a watershed moment for North Korea to admit a case,” Choo Jae-woo, a professor at Kyung Hee University, told Reuters. “I could be looking for help in the world. Perhaps for humanitarian assistance.
North Korea closed its borders, canceled international flights, and quarantined thousands of people shortly after the outbreak was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan earlier this year.
Experts have warned that the crisp health infrastructure in the North is poorly equipped to respond to a major outbreak.
Kim Jong-un, whose long absence from public life earlier this year sparked rumors that he had a serious heart condition, is speculated to have actually isolated himself.
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