(ORDO NEWS) — Residents of the city of Dandong, across the river from North Korea‘s Sinuiju, were urged not to open their windows to stop the epidemic.
Authorities in the Chinese city of Dandong, which is located right on the southwestern border with North Korea (separated by the Yalu River and the China-Korean Friendship Bridge), have admitted that neighbors are to blame for a suspicious increase in the number of new cases of coronavirus infection. Or rather, the wind that blows from the DPRK, Bloomberg writes.
The city has been in lockdown since the end of April, yet people continue to get infected. Moreover, according to the local Center for Disease Control, the majority of patients identified over the past week did not leave their homes at least four days before they were diagnosed with Covid-19.
As a result, it is not possible to establish the chain of transmission of the pathogen, the media notes. And the authorities did not find anything better than to recommend that people living near the waterfront get tested more often and do not open windows so that the wind does not bring them an infection.
The story of the spread of the coronavirus in North Korea is also amazing. While the world fought the pandemic for two and a half years, developed vaccines, introduced and lifted restrictions several times, underwent revaccination, North Korea said that they did not have Covid-19. And the outbreak of the “unknown fever” was first reported in mid-May.
The number of patients has already exceeded four million, by order of the leader of the country and the party Kim Jong-un, a lockdown and an “emergency anti-epidemic system of the highest level” have been introduced in all cities and districts of the republic.
China, for its part, is experiencing another wave of coronavirus. An anti-epidemiological protocol is still in force there, and residents of entire areas of such large cities as Shanghai are being quarantined (since the end of March, the entire metropolis has been put on strict self-isolation).
However, there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is able to spread by airborne droplets over such a long distance that separates the Chinese Dandong and the North Korean border city of Sinuiju.
In addition, viruses do not survive particularly well in sunlight and outdoors, and people are more likely to become infected through contact with neighbors, households , and through indoor ventilation.
Therefore, the recommendation of the Dandong authorities not to open windows at all can be harmful: as scientists have previously reported , airing the premises, on the contrary, helps reduce the risk of coronavirus disease.
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