For more than two years, North Korea insisted that its border controls had kept covid-19 out of the country even as it devastated most of the rest of the globe. No longer
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskEven for a country accustomed to bad news, the outbreak is disastrous. North Korea’s response to the pandemic was to close itself off from the world, reduce imports to a trickle and impose domestic travel restrictions. While other countries rushed to vaccinate their people, North Korea gambled that it could ride out the storm.
North Koreans will now suffer the consequences. Omicron is not especially dangerous in vaccinated populations, but still deadly for the immunologically naive. Hong Kong, which had a poor vaccination rate among the elderly when the variant hit, is a case in point. In late January its death toll stood at 205. Within two months it had climbed to nearly 8,000 after an Omicron outbreak spread like wildfire.
North Korea is likely to do even worse. The impoverished dictatorship lacks the testing and tracing infrastructure that other countries have built over the past two years. Its health-care sector suffered from serious underinvestment even before the pandemic. It does not have enough equipment and medical staff. Hospitals do not have regular power, clean water or proper sanitation. Two years of closed borders have depleted supplies of medicine, much of which is imported.
North Korea may turn to China, but its patron is already busy struggling to salvage its own failing zero-covid policy. If North Korea can be convinced to accept help from South Korea, the new president, Yook Suk-yeol, could make good on his promise that he would provide humanitarian aid “regardless of the circumstance”.
The irony is that North Korea might have been better off had it let covid spread early in the pandemic when the virus was less infectious . Had it done so, the curve of the epidemic would have been flatter and less hard to cope with today. The best-case scenario would be if there have been far more cases in the country than the government has previously admitted, meaning that there is some immunity in the population. For once, North Koreans should hope that their leaders have been lying to them.
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