South Korea has said that a defector who recently fled to the North does not appear to have contracted Covid-19, a day after Pyongyang imposed a lockdown near the border, claiming the man was its first recorded case of the illness.
North Korean state media reported on Sunday that the 24-year-old man, who was reportedly in quarantine, was displaying symptoms of coronavirus after returning to his homeland across the border separating the two Koreas last week.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, declared a state of “maximum emergency” and ordered the border town of Kaesong, where the defector was discovered, to go into lockdown, the state-run KCNA news agency said.
KCNA did not say if the man had been tested for Covid-19, but said an “uncertain result was made from several medical check-ups of the secretion of that person’s upper respiratory organ and blood”, prompting officials to quarantine the person and investigate anyone he may have been in contact with.
But on Monday, health authorities in the South said there was no evidence that the defector had contracted the illness.
“The person is neither registered as a Covid-19 patient nor classified as a person who came in contact with virus patients,” Yoon Tae-ho, a senior health official, said in a press briefing, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The Korean Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said two people who had been in close contact with the defector both tested negative, Yoon said, according to Yonhap.
South Korea’s military said the defector was believed to have swum to North Korea from the western border island of Ganghwa – the same route he took when he defected three years ago – after passing beneath barbed wire via a drain to evade South Korean security guards.
Only a small number of the estimated 33,000 North Koreans to have defected to the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean war return to the North. Some wished to see their families before they die, while other have grown disillusioned with life in the South, where they face discrimination in education and employment.
North Korea has not responded to South Korean claims that the defector, whom media reports have referred to only as “Kim”, does not have Covid-19.
Yonhap reported that the man had been under investigation for the alleged rape of a female defector last month.
South Korea managed to contain the virus in April through a combination of mass testing, tracing and isolation, but has struggled to suppress smaller outbreaks in the Seoul metropolitan area since late May.
On Monday, the KCDC reported 25 new infections, bringing the country’s total to 14,175, with 299 deaths. The new cases included 16 among people who had recently arrived from overseas.
Until the weekend, North Korea insisted that it had not discovered a single case of Covid-19 – a claim disputed by South Korean officials and some health experts.
According to KCNA, Kim Jong-un told an emergency meeting of the ruling party’s politburo on Sunday that “a critical situation” had developed “in which the vicious virus could be said to have entered the country”.
Some analysts believed the North’s “admission” that the virus had finally arrived in the country could indicate that it needed help tackling the virus.
“It’s an ice-breaking moment for North Korea to admit a case,” Choo Jae-woo, a professor at Kyung Hee University, told Reuters. “It could be reaching out to the world for help. Perhaps for humanitarian assistance.”
North Korea closed its borders, cancelled international flights and quarantined thousands of people soon after the outbreak was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan early this year.
Experts have warned that the North’s creaking health infrastructure is ill-equipped to respond to a major outbreak.
There is speculation that Kim Jong-un, whose long absence from public life earlier this year sparked rumours that he was suffering from a serious heart condition, was in fact self-isolating.
