SEOUL, South Korea — Shin Dong-yun, a scientist from the North Korean Institute of Virology, rushed to the northwestern border with China in early February. There, he performed 300 assessments, skipping meals to evaluate a stream of individuals in order that “the country is protected from the invasion of the novel coronavirus.”
Tales like this, carried within the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun, focus consideration on one of many stranger oddities surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic: How may North Korea declare to not have a single coronavirus case whereas nations all over the world stagger below the exploding epidemic?
However a long time of isolation and international sanctions have ravaged North Korea’s public well being system, elevating fears that it lacks the medical provides to struggle an outbreak, which many concern has already occurred.
Final month, Day by day NK, a Seoul-based mostly web site that hires nameless informants inside the North, reported the deaths of 200 troopers, in addition to 23 others, who have been suspected of contracting the coronavirus. But Kang Mi-jin, a North Korean defector-turned journalist in Seoul, stated that irrespective of how onerous they searched, her contacts in the North couldn’t discover a demise formally ascribed to the coronavirus.
Up to now, the nation has hushed or performed down epidemics, army rebellions, man-made disasters or anything that would undermine the folks’s religion within the authorities.
However this time, the North’s unusually aggressive strikes, in addition to its distinctive capacity to detain folks, might have prevented a devastating outbreak, stated Jung Gwang-il, a North Korean defector who leads No Chain, a North Korean human rights activist group in Seoul. As quickly as an outbreak was reported in China, North Korea rounded up all Chinese language guests in its northeastern city of Rason and quarantined them on an island for a month, Mr. Jung stated.
“It’s safe to say that there are cases in North Korea but I don’t think the outbreak there is as large as the ones we have seen in South Korea, Italy and the U.S.,” stated Ahn Kyung-su, the top of the Seoul-based mostly Analysis Heart of DPRK Well being and Welfare, which displays the North’s well being system. “North Koreans are trained to obey government orders in a shipshape way during crises. But there is the risk of the virus running out of control if it starts spreading among its malnourished people.”