The spread of COVID-19 in North Korea, newly recognized by Kim Jong-un’s regime, is about to trigger “a major health crisis” in this country, one of the most closed in the world, according to an expert from the North Korean question. A crisis that could shake this dictatorship, without however bringing it down, he adds.
“We are on the threshold of an unprecedented public health crisis in North Korea, drops in an interview at the To have to Mason Richey, professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. The virus is now circulating among a population that is massively unvaccinated, but also in poor health, and this, in a country where the public health system is fragile and the lack of diagnostic equipment and medication is glaring. »
In 2019, the North Korean healthcare system was ranked 193rd out of 195 countries by a study by the American Johns Hopkins University.
“Not to mention that the chronic problem of malnutrition risks being amplified if the authorities decide to order generalized confinement,” he continues.
Food insecurity seriously affects 42% of the North Korean population, according to the latest report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
And he adds: “This confinement is probably the only thing to do to try to stop the wave. But it also risks leading to a shortage of labor in the fields.”
Nearly 1.5 million cases in less than a week
On Tuesday, the Pyongyang regime confirmed a further rise of 269,210 more cases and six more deaths in a day, just days after officially admitting the presence of the coronavirus, the cause of what it simply calls it “fever”, for the first time in its territory since the start of the pandemic.
In total, 1.48 million people have been infected since the recognition of a first case last Thursday. Barely fifty people are said to have died, according to official figures which may not fully bear witness to the reality.
At least 663,910 people have been placed in quarantine.
With the likely exception of a few leaders, including Kim Jong-un, the COVID-19 vaccination has not reached the 26 million North Koreans, despite 1.9 million doses of AstraZeneca promised to the start of the global vaccination campaign by the COVAX program aimed at making this vaccination accessible to the poorest countries on the planet.
“COVAX has allocated doses to North Korea in several allocation rounds, but has not received any official requests for these vaccines since,” the official said on Tuesday. To have to Evan O’Connell, spokesperson for Gavi, which partly manages this global vaccine alliance.
The organization assures that these vaccines could be made available to the country “to enable it to catch up with international vaccination targets”. If requested.
On Monday, Kim Jong-un did not talk about a vaccination program, but rather criticized the North Korean government and his country’s health authorities for their poor management of this pandemic, which he called a “great upheaval”. . The inability to keep pharmacies open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week was at the heart of his anger.
North Korea is relying on painkillers and antibiotics to overcome the current wave of infections. For lack of anything better.
An “elixir of life”
On Tuesday, the regime mobilized the “powerful force” of the North Korean army’s medical corps to “stabilize the supply of drugs in the city of Pyongyang”, the regime’s propaganda agency KCNA said, referring to the distribution of a medicine called “elixir of life”, without specifying its nature and composition. A national containment has also been ordered in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus in the country.
Japanese website Asia Press, fed from inside North Korea by citizens with smuggled Chinese cellphones, reports that in North Hamgyŏng Province, pandemic prevention and control measures are now more fears by the local population than the virus itself.
“People normally go to the factories and to their workplaces,” said a party official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The authorities do not want the work to be interrupted. We take their temperature when they go to and from work.”
With soaring COVID-19 cases and a lack of tools to deal with it, the Pyongyang regime is preparing for a turbulent period that now threatens Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship, Mason Richey warns from Seoul. “Not because of the death rate, which could be potentially high, but because of the economic crisis that a generalized confinement could induce,” he said. “This could lead to shortages and discontent among the general population as well as party cadres.”
“Is this going to bring down Kim? It is very difficult to imagine. His regime is built precisely to be able to face any type of criticism and to repress any act of rebellion”.
For virologist Eric Frost, from the University of Sherbrooke, North Korea is now facing the variant, “Omicron, which is less pathogenic than the original strain”. “It will spread quickly, but with less severe symptoms in the healthy population,” he said in an interview.
In South Korea, the fatality rate for Omicron is currently 0.1%. In North Korea, however, it could climb to 1%, according to South Korean preventive medicine specialist Jung Jae-hun, quoted by The Guardian.
North Korea was one of the first countries in the world to close its borders in January 2020 after the virus emerged in neighboring China. This closure, coupled with the nature of the regime and the sanctions imposed by the West on Pyongyang, because of the nuclear ambitions of its leader, has forged a major economic crisis for two years, a crisis that this outbreak of cases could come to amplify and worsen.