What we know (and don’t know) about North Korea’s Covid outbreak
North Korea reported 21 more deaths and 174,440 new “fever cases” Friday, according to state media KCNA, though it did not specify how many of the deaths and cases were linked to Covid, likely due to the country’s extremely limited testing capacity.
But given the opaque nature of the regime and the country’s isolation from the world — a trend that has only exacerbated since the pandemic — it is extremely difficult to assess the real situation on the ground.
But North Korean state media reports have been vague, and many important questions remain unanswered, including the country’s vaccine coverage and the lockdown’s impact on the livelihood of its 25 million people.
Here is what we know, and what we don’t know about the outbreak:
How did the outbreak emerge?
North Korean authorities have not announced the cause of the outbreak.
It remains unclear how the virus slipped through the country’s tightly-sealed borders.
When KCNA reported on the first identification of Covid-19 in the country on Thursday, it did not even specify how many infections had been defected. It simply said samples collected from a group of people experiencing fevers on May 8 had tested positive for the highly contagious Omicron variant.
By Friday, KCNA was reporting that 18,000 new “fever cases” and six deaths were recorded on Thursday, including one who tested positive for the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.
“A fever whose cause couldn’t be identified explosively spread nationwide since late April,” the newspaper said. “As of now up to 187,800 people are being isolated.”
On Saturday, KCNA said a total of 524,440 people had reported “fever” symptoms between late April and May 13. Among them, 280,810 people were still being treated in quarantine, while the rest had recovered.
Can North Korea cope with a large-scale outbreak?
An outbreak of Covid-19 could prove disastrous for North Korea. The country’s dilapidated health care infrastructure and lack of testing equipment is unlikely to be up to the task of treating a large number of patients with a highly infectious disease.
North Korea’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to share information also poses a challenge.
North Korea has never formally acknowledged how many died during a devastating famine in the 1990s that experts suggest killed as many as 2 million. Those who fled the country at the time shared horrific stories of death and survival, and a country in chaos.
“North Korea has such a limited supply of basic medicine that public health officials need to focus on preventative medicine. They would be ill-equipped to deal with any kind of epidemic,” Jean Lee, director off the Hyundai…
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