An amazing quarantine job – or a big lie
Few health experts believe that North Korea managed to keep out Covid-19 since early 2020. So when Kim Jong Un officially confirmed the nation’s first case on Thursday, the question was more: ‘‘Why now?’’
Kim has long trumpeted his virus control measures as evidence of his nation’s superiority, calling the efforts a ‘‘shining success’’. He sealed the border, crippling an already anaemic economy, and banned athletes from two Olympic Games. To keep the disease out, his troops even shot, killed and burned the body of a South Korean government employee which had drifted near to the nautical border.
All along, outsiders speculated that Covid-19 was already in North Korea, despite its isolation.
The commander of United States Forces Korea said as early as July 2020 that the virus had almost certainly made its way into the country, and both China and Russia had reported outbreaks near their borders with North Korea.
North Korea watchers said Kim probably disclosed the outbreak because it was too big to hide, and it was more important now to appear like he was responding quickly.
Kim is probably confident that the outbreak can be managed,
North Korea has refused to join global vaccine-sharing initiatives, leaving the population vulnerable to fast-spreading variants of the virus.
Authorities have attributed the outbreak to the highly contagious BA.2 omicron subvariant. State media reported yesterday that six people had died, more than 350,000 others had fallen ill, and 187,800 people were being isolated for treatment.
‘‘North Korea, with a huge immunity gap – no protection acquired with vaccines or prior infections – is an open field for uncontrolled transmission, which maximises the odds of new variants,’’ said J. StephenMorrison,
according to Rachel Minyoung Lee, a non-resident fellow with the 38 North Program at the Stimson Centre.
‘‘The North Korean leadership likely felt that acknowledging an outbreak in a timely manner, and showing the public that the leadership was responding quickly, was necessary for effectively controlling the situation and seeking the people’s cooperation in the regime’s director of the Global Health Policy Centre atWashington-based think tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
John PMoore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University’sWeill Cornell Medicine, said that unless North Korea was able to limit transmission through a lockdown, ‘‘a very high percentage of the population’’ would soon be infected.
Rumours have swirled that North Korea’s political elites are already vaccinated.
North Korea’s government rejected doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine out of apparent concerns about potential side effects. It also
stepped-up quarantine efforts,’’ said Lee, who worked as an analyst for the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise for almost two decades.
There are plenty of places where the virus could have entered North Korea. While airports have largely been shut during the pandemic, the regime reopened a rail link with China in January, and black market traders frequently cross the border. A United Nations body has said satturned down the delivery of nearly 3 million doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine, saying the shipments should go to other countries suffering more severe outbreaks.
Vaccines previously allocated for North Korea under the Covax, the global vaccination effort backed by the World Health Organisation, are no longer available.
A spokesperson for Gavi, a nonprofit that helps to coordinate Covax, said that if Pyongyang moved forward with a national Covid vaccination programme, Gavi could work with Covax to help North Korea catch up with immunisation targets. ellite images show sea traffic at its main international port of Nampho, and illicit trade is conducted on the open seas in violation of sanctions.
In the meantime, North Korea has held several large-scale gatherings, including amilitary parade last month that included tens of thousands of maskless soldiers, a maskless leader and maskless masses.
Still, North Korea should be able to keep its public in order. It maintains one of the most repressive systems on the planet.
In July 2020, it locked down the border city of Kaesong out of fear that a person who had defected from South Korea may have carried the virus.
On Thursday, North Korea launched three short-range ballistic missiles towards the sea, South Korea and Japan said, in what was possibly a show of strength after Kim publicly acknowledged the Covid outbreak.