Lockdown orders appear to be in effect for residents of Pyongyang, informed sources told NK News, a day after North Korean authorities ordered everyone in the capital to return home.
Residents in the city abruptly canceled meetings and formed long lines at bus stops in the capital on Tuesday afternoon, sources told NK News, due to a “nationwide lockdown” and unspecified “national problem.”
Multiple sources in the city have also heard reports of panic buying leading to product shortages due to uncertainty about when the lockdown might end.
Sources told NK News that movement controls were still in place as of Wednesday afternoon but that North Korean authorities have provided no further details. Similar lockdown orders were issued at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
The measures seem different from other temporary stay-indoors orders implemented several times in the last year due to “yellow dust” drifting in from overseas, the sources said, but there is no clear link to suggest the current lockdown is due to a local outbreak of COVID.
North Korean state media has continued to publish and broadcast as normal and has not reported on any lockdowns as of Wednesday evening KST.
Phone calls on Wednesday by NK News to various organizations and businesses in Pyongyang mostly failed to connect, with the international operator stating that no one was answering. Some calls to international hotels did go through, but staff hung up on multiple occasions when asked if facilities were open.
“No comment,” an official at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang told NK News when asked about the lockdown on Wednesday.
North Korean farmers were observed by NK News going about their daily business near the inter-Korean border at Paju around 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday KST, some three hours after the lockdown order was announced in Pyongyang.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency also published photos on Wednesday afternoon from the same location showing residents working outside and soldiers herding cattle. Daily NK said the same day that rice planting in South Hamgyong Province continued, albeit amid a strict quarantine management system.
The apparent movement restrictions in the capital come weeks after North Korea and China suspended overland trade following a surge in COVID-19 cases in China’s Liaoning and Jilin Provinces, both of which border North Korea.
Authorities also ordered residents indoors on short notice last week, but sources in Pyongyang told NK News that the lockdown was explicitly linked to yellow dust.
North Korea has told residents on multiple occasions to shelter indoors due to fears of COVID-19 arriving in the country from foreign dust storms.
Edited by Arius Derr
Lockdown orders appear to be in effect for residents of Pyongyang, informed sources told NK News, a day after North Korean authorities ordered everyone in the capital to return home.
Residents in the city abruptly canceled meetings and formed long lines at bus stops in the capital on Tuesday afternoon, sources told NK News, due to a “nationwide lockdown” and unspecified “national problem.”
