Coronavirus News: North Korea Quarantines Foreigners To Prevent Spread Of Virus

North Korea has reportedly quarantined 380 foreigners in the country to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, state-run media reported Monday. The foreigners are mostly diplomats in the country’s capital, Pyongyang, but their nationalities have not been made public.

North Korea has a strict quarantine policy, with 200 of the affected foreigners already under quarantine for the past 30 days. A North Korean official who returned from China earlier this month was supposedly executed after he went to a public bath in violation of his quarantine.

Pyongyang has asserted that there are currently no cases of coronavirus on its territory. Public health and political experts have cast doubt on this claim.

"Past epidemics that originated in China have always spread to North Korea, and vice versa," Choi Jung-hoon, a research professor at Korea University's Public Policy Research Institute in Seoul told NPR.

"Given past examples, North Korea's official announcement that it has no patients cannot be trusted," Choi said.

"North Korea has no capability or will to run quarantine facilities and isolate patients."

Amnesty International has previously described North Korea's healthcare system as "crumbling."

Harry Kazianis, director of Korean Studies at the Center of National Interest, told Fox News recently that North Korea is “clearly lying” about coronavirus cases on its territory in order to save face.

“There is no way that North Korea is not being impacted by the coronavirus — they are clearly lying as they don’t want to show any weakness or that there is any threat to the regime,” he said. “Considering how there are many porous sections of the North Korea-China border — and how the Kim regime depends on illegal trade to survive — it is clear the virus has come to North Korea.”

The coronavirus originated at an animal and seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The Chinese government has put millions of its citizens on lockdown in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

There are currently over 79,000 coronavirus cases worldwide, with the majority of cases in mainland China. More than 2,600 have been killed, as cases surge in South Korea, Iran and Italy.