Local health officials weren’t asked to confirm cases or submit them to the central government in Pyongyang, Choi said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Experts say North Korea’s reluctance to admit major outbreaks of disease, its wrecked medical infrastructure and its extreme sensitivity to any potential threat to Kim Jong Un’s authoritarian rule means that Pyongyang is likely handling the current coronavirus pandemic in the same manner.“It’s a lie,” Choi, 45, said. “Year after year, and in every season, diverse infectious diseases repeatedly occur but North Korea says there isn’t any outbreak.
While there have been no reliable outside reports of mass infections in North Korea yet, the country’s tight control on information allows few foreign experts to assert with an authority that the North’s quarantine regime has been successful. As seen in Singapore, the coronavirus can surge again, and North Korea’s powerful Politburo said last week it would further bolster anti-epidemic steps.
North Korea’s socialist free medical service collapsed in the mid-1990s amid economic chaos and a famine that killed an estimated hundreds of thousands. In recent years, Kim Jong Un has built new hospitals and modernized some medical facilities as the economy improved, but most of the medical benefits still largely go to his ruling elite, experts say.
Choi, the doctor who worked in North Korea, said his monthly salary was the equivalent of about 2 kilograms of rice and that he received cigarettes from patients in return for telling them what medicine they should buy at markets. During the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, Choi said hundreds of people in Chongjin died after suffering flu-like symptoms during eight months of intense quarantine.
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