On Thursday, North Korea officially verified its first COVID-19 outbreak and declared a state of emergency, with state media saying that a sub-variant of the highly transmissible Omicron virus had been identified in Pyongyang.
“There has been the country’s largest emergency event, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front that has been held safely for the last two years and three months from February 2020,” the official KCNA news agency reported.
The study said that persons in Pyongyang had caught the Omicron variety, but provided no information on case numbers or potential sources of infection. The samples from the sick patients were gathered on May 8, according to the report.
The study was released as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over a Workers’ Party conference to consider responses to the first coronavirus epidemic. Meanwhile, the European Union will no longer suggest medical masks be worn at airports and on aircraft beginning next week, despite the lifting of coronavirus restrictions across the EU, officials said Wednesday, but member states can still demand them.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency expressed confidence that the decision, reached in collaboration with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, would represent “a significant step forward in the normalization of air travel” for passengers and staff.
Meanwhile, according to Reuters, the United States has already registered more than 1 million COVID-19 deaths, crossing a previously inconceivable milestone around two years after the first instances upended and dramatically revolutionized normal life.
Even as the threat posed by the virus fades in many people’s minds, the one million milestone serves as a poignant reminder of the overwhelming sadness and loss inflicted by the epidemic. It accounts for approximately one mortality for every 327 Americans, or more than the whole population of San Francisco or Seattle.
The virus has claimed 36 deaths in the United States by the time the World Health Organization (WHO) designated COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020. The lethal virus spread like wildfire in the months that followed, first in heavily populated urban areas like New York City and eventually reaching every part of the country.