Kim Jong-un’s regime boasted of having succeeded keep North Korea free of any covid-19 cases for two years, while the rest of the world fought epidemics and invested in massive vaccination processes. From now on, the appearance of the first publicly confirmed cases could plunge the country into a catastrophe comparable to the food shortages of the 1990s alone.
Since the first case of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus was publicly acknowledged by the North Korean authorities last Thursday, more than 1.7 million were registered, according to known figures. The daily rise in infections has been more than 200,000, although the regime says more than a million have recovered in the meantime. A total of 62 people died.
As in other areas, few outside observers trust the data published by North Korean state authorities, both because of the ongoing need to cover up failures and because of the technical inability to perform tests at large scale. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, North Korea has carried out just over 64,000 tests, while its southern neighbor has 172 million, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The cases that were reported last week are limited exclusively to people who show symptoms of “fever”, as described by official bodies.
The outlook “is very bad,” he told the Guardian Professor of Korean Studies at the University of London, Owen Miller. “They are dealing with the rampant spread of [variante] Ómicron without the protection of vaccines, without much – if any – immunity among the population and without access to most drugs that have been used to treat covid-19 in other countries,” he adds.
The profusion of infections can have devastating potential in a country where there is no certainty about the vaccination rate, which, at the limit, can be zero. Kim’s regime refused to provide Covid-19 vaccines from the Covax program, organized by the United Nations as well as South Korea. Authorities in Seoul have contacted Pyongyang again since the cases began to be reported to arrange some sort of humanitarian support, but they have received no response.
The seriousness of the situation – compounded by chronic food production and supply problems – has prompted Kim Jong-un to level rare criticism at the government he leads, accusing the authorities of “immaturity” in the way they have handled the pandemic. According to state news agency KCNA, the North Korean leader criticized leaders at a Workers’ Party summit for “non-positive attitude, negligence and inactivity” in the early stages of the pandemic, at a when “time is life”.
Without wanting to accept any form of foreign aid, the regime’s strategy followed China’s example, with the application of containment measures in its main cities, but without closing workplaces. A ban on movement outside the districts was imposed and the army was mobilized to distribute drugs and support testing. The Chinese authorities, who maintain their bet on the “zero case” strategy, have reinforced containment measures in the towns closest to the border.
North Korea’s secrecy and refusal to accept international aid recalls the period in the 1990s when the country faced a severe food crisis in which millions died of malnutrition. The loss of economic support from the Soviet Union, which had collapsed shortly before, and failures in the management of agricultural policy, also associated with a series of droughts and monsoons, were at the root of the crisis.
In order to hide the catastrophe from the outside world, the regime masked the scale of the crisis and rejected humanitarian aid which involved the entry of foreigners into the country. Professor of Medicine at Korea University in Seoul, Kim Sin-gon, quoted by Guardianfears that a new tragic episode will befall its northern neighbor: “North Korea could end up having the worst death and infection rates of the pandemic in the whole world given the size of its population. “