Covid hits N Korea

North Korea has confirmed 15 more deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional patients as it mobilises more than a million health and other workers to try to suppress the country’s first Covid-19 outbreak. After maintaining a widely disputed claim to be coronavirus-free for more than two years, North Korea announced Thursday that it had found its first Covid-19 patients since the pandemic began. It has since said a fever has spread across the country “explosively” since late April but hasn’t disclosed how many cases it has found. The outbreak has triggered concern about a humanitarian crisis in North Korea because most of the country’s 26 million people are believed to be unvaccinated and its public health care system has been in shambles for decades.