North Korea has confirmed its first COVID-19 death, and says hundreds of thousands of people have “fever”, in the first indication of the scale of the outbreak in its largely unvaccinated population. The nuclear-armed country announced on Thursday its first coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began, moving into lockdown after it said people in the capital, Pyongyang, tested positive for the Omicron variant. “A fever whose cause couldn’t be identified explosively spread nationwide from late April,” the official Korean Central News Agency said on Friday. “Six persons died (one of them tested positive for the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron),” it added. About 350,000 people have shown signs of “fever”, while 187,800 people are being treated in isolation, according to KCNA. Experts worry North Korea’s health system will be unable to cope with spread of COVID in an unvaccinated population, they also believe the virus has been present in the country for some time, the authorities only a...
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