North Korea on Friday suggested that propaganda balloons floated over the border from the south could be to blame for an outbreak of COVID cases inside the Hermit Kingdom. For years, activists in South Korea have sent leaflets critical of Kim Jong Un’s regime into North Korea by attaching them to balloons. Now state media says infection clusters in the town of Ipho near the border began after an 18-year-old soldier and a five-year-old came into contact with “alien things” in April. Pyongyang’s epidemic prevention center ordered officials to “deal with alien things coming by wind and other climate phenomena and balloons” along the border to stop future infections. The idea that the balloons could be spreading COVID to North Korea has been rejected by South Korea’s Unification Ministry. North Korea admitted its first COVID-19 outbreak on May 12 after dubiously insisting for two years that the country had managed to avoid a single case of illness linked to the pandemic.
