During the COVID pandemic, North Korea closed its borders, expelled all foreign citizens (including diplomatic staff), and engaged in the strictest national lockdown of any country. To further control the pandemic, the country would also lockdown and isolate whole cities whenever cases of unspecified "fever" hit. However, Pyongyang refused to admit to any actual cases of the COVID-19 viral illness until mid-2022, more than two years after the global pandemic began.
AccessDPRK, along with additional information gathered by NK Pro, used satellite imagery to directly counter that claim by showing that authorities had begun building COVID isolation facilities in most counties as early as the Winter of 2020/Spring of 2021. They continued to construct new satellite facilities and extensions as late as 2023.
AccessDPRK has continued to monitor these sites and at the time of this writing, has identified 126 locations.
However, 2025 imagery from Google Earth of several of the isolation facilities shows that at least eight of them have likely been closed with seven of them reverted back to their original use and one of the closed sites has been completely demolished.
For the sites in Changpung (38.093365° 126.678362°), Chongjin (41.844432° 129.724593°), Chongnam (39.494703° 125.450490°), Kimhyonggwon (40.825335° 128.133432°), Kimhyonjik (41.499954° 127.277062°), Koksan (38.795817° 126.688550°), and Orang (41.441129° 129.675561°), the COVID facilities have been closed and the facility in Samsu (41.285784° 128.028118°) has been razed.
However, other facilities that also have imagery from 2025 (such as in Chungsan and Hagap) still remain intact, so a wider trend of dismantlement can't yet be assumed.
These facilities were likely never meant to be permanent structures and were only created in response to a rapidly evolving health crisis. Most of the sites were repurposed existing buildings that were converted to this use, and most of the buildings are quite small at only 100-200 square meters; although, some larger complexes do exist such as in Sinmak and Unsan.
With the exception of the Samsu building, which was demolished, the other known closed sites have likely been restored back to their original purposes.
There is very limited direct information about what happened inside of these COVID facilities or the level of care patients received. But given their limited size and tight security (with gates and guard towers as well as the double fence), it's doubtful that critical medical care was being provided, and they likely served only to isolate suspected cases.
These are the first of the purpose-built COVID facilities known to have been closed down, perhaps representing a shift in the government's focus and the perception that the virus no longer poses as much of a threat to the population (despite relatively low vaccination levels) and may as well reflect ongoing improvements made to regional hospitals.
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