A man who recently swam to North Korea after deserting years ago, prompting Kim Jong Un to lock up a border city for fear of having the coronavirus, is not actually carrying the disease, the south revealed Monday. .
The 24-year-old arrived at the Hermit Kingdom last week after crawling under the barbed wire into a drain on Ganghwa Island and then crossing a portion of the Yellow Sea, according to the BBC.
“The person is not registered as a Covid-19 patient, nor classified as a person who came into contact with patients with the virus,” the station told Yoon Tae-ho, a senior South Korean health official, who told him to the Yonhap News Agency.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un placed the city of Kaesong near the South Korean border under full lockdown after a person was found there with suspicious symptoms of COVID-19, saying “the vicious virus” may have entered the country, state media reported.
(Naohiko Hatta / Kyodo News / Korea Central News Agency / Korea News Service via AP)
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The man was reportedly identified after South Korean military officials found a bag he is believed to have left behind during his escape.
North Korean state media reported Sunday that an alleged coronavirus patient within his country is a fugitive who fled to South Korea three years ago before illegally crossing the border into the North early last week.
The news prompted Kim to put the border city of Kaesong into a total closure on Friday afternoon.
During an emergency meeting of the Politburo the next day, Kim also declared a state of emergency in the Kaesong area and “clarified the determination of the Party Central Committee to move from the state emergency antidepidemic system to the maximum emergency system and issue a report of emergency”. class alert, ”said the Korean Central News Agency.
KIM JONG UN SAYS THAT THE ‘VICIOUS VIRUS’ MAY BE IN THE COUNTRY
He quoted Kim as saying there was “a critical situation where it could be said that the vicious virus entered the country.”
Kim added that he took “the preventive measure of completely blocking the city of Kaesong and isolating each district and region from the other” on Friday afternoon after receiving the report thereon, according to KCNA.
KCNA also said that respiratory secretion and blood tests showed that the person was “suspected to have been infected” with the coronavirus and that the person was quarantined.
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Describing its antivirus efforts as a “matter of national existence,” North Korea earlier this year closed almost all cross-border traffic, banned foreign tourists, and mobilized health workers to quarantine anyone with symptoms. But the Kaesong closure is the first known measure in a North Korean city to stop the pandemic.
North Korea continues to insist that it has zero confirmed cases of coronavirus, a claim that many outside experts suspect is false.
Travis Fedschun of Fox News and Associated Press contributed to this report.
