‘Everyone needs to face up to the reality of emergency,’ Kim Jong Un was quoted as saying.
Photo: STR/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesSEOUL—North Korea reported its first apparent Covid-19 case at a city near the border with South Korea, as leader Kim Jong Un enacted the country’s maximum emergency system and warned officials to “face up to the reality.”
The ill individual was a runaway who had gone to South Korea three years ago and had illegally crossed back into North Korea on July 19, according to a Sunday state-media report. The person is suspected of having been infected with the “vicious virus” after several medical checkups had shown an uncertain result, the North’s state media said.
Mr. Kim learned of the case Friday afternoon, then immediately locked down the city of Kaesong and required those who had crossed paths with the individual to be investigated, examined and quarantined, according to the state-media report. The city is about 100 miles south of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
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“Everyone needs to face up to the reality of emergency,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying at a Workers’ Party meeting Saturday.
Later on Sunday, South Korea’s military said it was looking into the possible illegal border crossing. South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap News Agency identified the individual as a 24-year-old man with the surname Kim, who escaped to the South three years ago by swimming across the Han River’s estuary that separates the two Koreas.
The young man in question finished middle school in Kaesong before fleeing to the South where he settled in Gimpo, a city about 15 miles west of Seoul, local media said.
This isn’t the first time a North Korean escapee has returned back North after settling in the South. Seoul’s Ministry of Unification says nine escapees re-entered the North between 2016 and 2018, based on its verification of North Korea’s state-media reports. More than 33,000 North Korean escapees have settled in South Korea as of March 2020.
North Korea, one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries, would be particularly vulnerable if the coronavirus spread across the population. The country was among the first to take aggressive measures against the virus in January, sealing off its borders as cases surged in neighboring China and suspending foreign tourism.
Throughout the year, the government in Pyongyang had yet to report a single Covid-19 case—a claim medical experts familiar with the country’s health-care system had viewed skeptically.
North Korea had in recent months received some medical supplies from outside relief agencies. The country had tested more than 1,100 people for the coronavirus through this past week, according to NK News, which reports on North Korean affairs, citing the World Health Organization’s representative to Pyongyang.
Senior officials, including Mr. Kim, have limited their recent public appearances compared with prior years, as the North has closed down its schools and kept its borders sealed off from outsiders. The focus on containing the virus, both in the North and the U.S., reduces the odds of any major breakthroughs on nuclear talks this year, according to security analysts.
Earlier this month, Mr. Kim, at a Politburo meeting, chastised officials for what he said was inattention to the country’s countermeasures against the coronavirus pandemic. He warned that failure to stay vigilant will result in an “unimaginable and irretrievable crisis.”
On July 10, Rodong Sinmun, the North’s main newspaper, published a report that said “protecting and promoting the people’s life and health” is the ruling party’s most important priority, even more important than economic success.
Write to Timothy W. Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com and Eun-Young Jeong at Eun-Young.Jeong@wsj.com
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