Covid-19: North Korea blames ‘alien things’ near border with South for outbreak

North Korea claimed on Friday that the country’s first Covid-19 outbreak began with patients touching “alien things” near the border with South Korea, apparently shifting blame to the neighbour for the wave of infections that hit the isolated country.

Announcing its probe results, the North ordered its people to “vigilantly deal with alien things coming by wind and other climate phenomena and balloons in the areas along the demarcation line and borders,” the official KCNA news agency said.

The agency did not directly mention South Korea, but North Korean defectors and activists have for decades flown balloons from the South across the heavily fortified border, carrying leaflets and humanitarian aid.

According to KCNA, an 18-year-old soldier and a five-year-old kindergartner who contacted the unidentified materials “in a hill around barracks and residential quarters” in the eastern county of Kumgang in early April showed symptoms and later tested positive for the coronavirus.

The KCNA said all other fever cases reported in the country until mid-April were due to other diseases, but it did not elaborate.

“It’s hard to believe North Korea’s claim, scientifically speaking, given that the possibility of the virus spreading through objects is quite low,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the risk of people getting infected with Covid through contact with contaminated surfaces or objects is generally considered low, though it is possible.

The North also said the first two patients touched the unspecified objects in the eastern town in early April, but the first time a defectors’ group is known to have sent balloons across the border this year was in late April from the western Gimpo region.

The North’s first admission of a Covid outbreak came months after it eased border lockdowns enforced since early in 2020 to resume freight train operations with China.

But it would have been difficult for Pyongyang to point fingers at China, said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University.