Activists have been using balloons for years to send anti-dictatorship leaflets across the country’s heavily armed borders. They are also trying to send humanitarian aid in this way. So Corona will now be deliberately brought to North Korea by balloons, making people in the border area get sick if they touch it.

For two years, North Korea insisted it had not recorded a single case of the virus, but had to admit its first infections on May 12. Fears arose of a humanitarian public health disaster in a poor country.

Today, the country reported 4,570 people had symptoms of a new fever, bringing the total number of cases to nearly five million, with a population of 25 million. Health authorities are referring to symptoms of fever rather than Covid-19, likely due to a lack of testing kits. North Korea has reported only 73 deaths. The totalitarian system makes it impossible to check statistics on cases and deaths.

The official Korean Central News Agency said today, that it had found clusters of infection in the city of Ifo, near the southeastern border with South Korea, and that some residents had traveled to the capital, Pyongyang, with symptoms of fever. An 18-year-old soldier and a 5-year-old had been in contact with “stranger things” in the city in early April and then tested positive for omicron. A sharp increase in cases of fever was observed in those in contact with them. This was the first time a group of feverish individuals had appeared in the area.”

The first time that North Korea suspected of sending ‘corona balloons’ across the border was at the end of April. The Korean Central News Agency warns citizens to “be vigilant about extraterrestrial objects carried by wind and other weather phenomena or balloons in the areas along the border.” South Korea’s news agency reports do not explicitly mention, but experts have no doubt that North Korea is accusing the neighboring country.

South Korea says there is “no possibility” that the coronavirus actually entered the North via balloons. Experts also criticize the claims of the capital, Pyongyang. “Scientifically it’s hard to believe that the virus spreads through things, because the chances of the virus spreading through surfaces are very small,” Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told IPS. Watchman† The most plausible explanation is that the virus entered the country through cross-border trade with China.

North Korea has refused foreign aid in the form of medical supplies and coronavirus vaccines.

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