North Korea’s health care infrastructure remains broken and many of the North's unvaccinated population are malnourished. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Friday that more than 350,000 people have been treated for fever that “explosively" spread nationwide since late April and that 162,200 of them were recovered.
It said that 18,000 people were newly found with fever symptoms on Thursday alone. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the cases were COVID-19 as KCNA said the cause of the fever couldn’t be identified.
KCNA said one of the six people who died was confirmed to have been infected with the omicron variant. Currently, it said that 187,800 people in North Korea are being isolated for treatment.
North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown on Thursday to control its first acknowledged Covid-19 outbreak after maintaining a widely doubted claim for more than two years that it completely fended off the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.