SEOUL, South Korea — After North Korea on Sunday accused a man of secretly crossing into the country from South Korea and bringing the coronavirus with him, Seoul went in search of any defectors in the South who had gone missing.
By Monday, South Korean officials had zeroed in on a 24-year-old man, identified only by his family name, Kim, who in 2017 swam across the western inter-Korea border to defect to the South. On July 19, he swam back across the border into Kaesong in the North after crawling through a drain under barbed-wire fences, they said.
It was not immediately clear why the defector had crossed one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders to return to the North. The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the man had been wanted by the South Korean police for questioning after a fellow North Korean defector accused him of raping her last month.
But North Korea said on Sunday that the North Korean man was “suspected to have been infected with the vicious virus,” adding that he could be the country’s first virus case. And the reverse defection prompted the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to order a total lockdown of Kaesong, a city of 300,000 people on the border with South Korea, and declare a “maximum” national emergency.
Until Sunday, North Korea had repeatedly said that it had no Covid-19 cases. The claim was questioned by outside experts given that the country shares a long land border with China, where the virus erupted late last year. The North also lacks equipment and medicine to fight an epidemic.
But South Korea officials could not say whether the man might have carried the coronavirus across the border.
He had never been tested for the virus, Yoon Tae-ho, a senior official at the South’s national disease-control headquarters, said on Monday, and he was not known to have been in contact with a coronavirus patient. The South Korean health authorities have tracked down two people who had frequent contact with the defector while he was in the South, and both tested negative, he said.
South Korea’s military said on Monday that its investigators had found a bag belonging to the defector abandoned on Ganghwa Island, west of Seoul. They also found signs that he had crawled through a drain beneath the border’s barbed-wire fences.
“We spotted the specific location from which he crossed over to the North on Ganghwa Island,” said Col. Kim Jun-rak, a spokesman for the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a briefing on Monday.
The defector’s current location is not known. South Korean officials said he was a native of Kaesong and was apparently familiar with the terrain around the western front line, where the Han River divides North and South Korea before emptying into the Yellow Sea. At some spots, the two sides are separated by over a mile of water.
The Coronavirus Outbreak ›
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 23, 2020
-
What is school going to look like in September?
- It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.
-
Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
-
What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
- Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.
-
What’s the best material for a mask?
- Scientists around the country have tried to identify everyday materials that do a good job of filtering microscopic particles. In recent tests, HEPA furnace filters scored high, as did vacuum cleaner bags, fabric similar to flannel pajamas and those of 600-count pillowcases. Other materials tested included layered coffee filters and scarves and bandannas. These scored lower, but still captured a small percentage of particles.
-
Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
He apparently swam across the same general area when he originally defected. At least four other North Koreans have swum across the western river border to the South since 2012.
A vast majority of the 33,000 North Koreans who have fled to the South since the early 1990s came through China. But some, like Mr. Kim, have crossed the inter-Korean border, which, in addition to being fortified by layers of tall, barbed-wire fences, is guarded by armed sentries and minefields.
"back" - Google News
July 27, 2020 at 03:08PM
https://ift.tt/2WZWMRl
South Korea Confirms a Defector Swam Back to the North - The New York Times
"back" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QNOfxc
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "South Korea Confirms a Defector Swam Back to the North - The New York Times"
Post a Comment