The unification ministry said that strained inter-Korean relations and COVID-19 led to an absence of exchanges between North and South Korea over the past two years.

According to the ministry on Friday, there were zero personnel exchanges between the two countries in 2021 and 2022, with no inter-Korean visits by government officials at all.

2021 was the first year to log zero exchanges since 1989, when the country started compiling related data.

The number of cross-border visitors reached nearly 75-hundred in 2018 when a summit was held between the two Koreas as well another between North Korea and the U.S., climbing to nine-thousand-835 in 2019 before slipping to 613 in 2020 due to the outbreak of COVID-19.