North Korea has ordered a strict national blockade after confirming its first official infections with Covid-19.

State media have reported an Omicron explosion in the capital, Pyongyang, but have not stated the number of cases, the Telegraph reports.

North Korea has rejected any vaccine program, even when supplies from other countries were offered.

Instead, it "controlled Covid by closing its borders" - and had never registered a case, despite experts believing the virus had been around for some time.

Foreigners say the country's 25 million population is vulnerable due to the lack of a vaccine program against Covid-19, even rejecting offers from the international community to supply millions of AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines produced in China last year. .

There have also been concerns about North Korea's poor healthcare system.

The KCNA said leader Kim Jong-un had vowed to extinguish the blast, which he called a "grave national emergency."

At the meeting outlining the new rules against Covid-19, Kim was seen wearing a face mask on television for what is believed to be the first time.

He quickly removed it while the other officers present continued to hold theirs.

Otherwise, such reporting comes more than two years after the reporting of a pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China.

On December 31, 2019, the outbreak was detected in a new strain of coronavirus, which was given the temporary name 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization, which was later renamed SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee for Virus Taxonomy.

As of May 10, 2022, there have been at least 6,266,376 confirmed deaths and more than 518,368,648 confirmed cases.

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