On May 12, the North Korean authorities announced the first case of coronavirus infection in the country and introduced a lockdown, according to the South Korean edition of Yonhap , citing a North Korean news agency.
A variant of COVID-19 under the designation Omicron was identified as a result of testing a group of patients with high fever in Pyongyang. The exact number of infected people is not specified, but the diagnosis was confirmed in several people.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at a meeting of the Politburo announced the introduction of the "most serious emergency" regime and a strict lockdown in all cities and villages in order to completely block the spread of coronavirus.
Despite this, Kim Jong-un ordered government members to fulfill all the plans for economic development on time and complete the construction of facilities on time.
Thus, at the moment, Turkmenistan remains the only mainland state that denies the presence of those infected with the coronavirus on its territory.
In reality, over the past two years, the country has been covered by several waves of COVID-19. At the end of the summer of 2021, the strongest of all began. As Correspondents of “Chronicles of Turkmenistan” reported at the time, there had never been such a number of cases and deaths during the previous waves of coronavirus. Our respondents said that they themselves had been ill or that their relatives or friends had been ill. Panic and chaos reigned in overcrowded hospitals.
The Turkmen authorities introduced quarantine measures (restricting movement, obliging residents to wear masks, etc.), the need for which was explained by contradictory reasons and made statements that were ambiguous from the point of view of medical science.
For example, the need to wear masks at different times was explained by the presence of dust particles in the air (sometimes it was reported that the coronavirus is carried hundreds of kilometers, settling on dust, sometimes - that dust can cause mechanical damage to the lungs), the spread of "seasonal viral diseases" or recommendations for allergy sufferers, which can thus be protected from plant pollen.
By the way, the possibility of transferring the coronavirus hundreds of kilometers through the “yellow” dust was also announced in the DPRK.
President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has repeatedly stated that it is possible to disinfect rooms from viruses by fumigating them with dry harmala branches, and also that licorice root can be used to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
In November 2021, for the first time, a WHO representative publicly expressed doubts that there was no coronavirus in Turkmenistan.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading around the world for almost two years now. From a scientific point of view, it is hardly possible to imagine that there is no virus in Turkmenistan,” said WHO senior emergency officer Katherine Smallwood .
Source: Chronicles of Turkmenistan