North Korea: Pyongyang on lockdown due to 'respiratory illness'

Officials in North Korea have placed its capital Pyongyang on lockdown for five cases due to the increasing cases of respiratory illness. The lockdown follows months after North Korea declared to have overcome its outbreak of COVID-19.

The South Korea-based NK news outlet and the Russian Embassy in North Korea said on Wednesday that officials had placed Pyongyang on lockdown for five days due to rising cases of respiratory illness among the residents, citing a government notice. The notice said that foreign delegations must keep their employees indoors and for individuals to take their temperatures four times a day and report the results to a hospital by phone.

While the notice did not mention COVID-19, it cited an “increase in winter cases of recurrent flu and other respiratory diseases.” NK News first reported the order in Pyongyang.

The lockdown follows the report the day before that residents in North Korea were stocking up on goods in anticipation of stricter measures. It remains to be determined if other areas of the isolated nation have also gone under lockdowns. North Korean state media has continued to report anti-pandemic measures to counter respiratory diseases such as the flu but has yet to report on the lockdown order in Pyongyang.

North Korean state media KCNA said on Tuesday that residents in the city of Kaesong, which is close to the border with South Korea, increased its public communication campaigns “so that all working people observe anti-epidemic regulations voluntarily in their work and life.”

On Thursday, the United States-led United Nations Command said that both North Korea and South Korea breached their armistice by sending drones into each other’s airspace back in December. The UN Command, which helped oversee the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas since the 1950-1953 Korean War, launched a probe of the December airspace incursions to see if there were violations of the armistice.

The command said in a statement that the incursions by both Koreas were equal to violations of the armistice, but South Korea’s efforts to shoot down the drones in its airspace did not breach the armistice.

Five North Korean drones made an incursion into South Korea’s airspace on December 26, prompting the South Korean military to scramble jets and helicopters while also sending its own surveillance aircraft to monitor North Korea’s military installations.