For more than two years, North Korea successfully prevented the arrival of covid-19, according to its records.
It has done so by pushing its isolation to the extreme: since January 2020, it has not allowed anyone to enter the country – not even North Koreans – and has reinforced fences and border posts, where soldiers they have orders to shoot to all who approach.
It also stores and sanitizes all products imported from China for weeks to ensure they don’t have the slightest trace of the virus.
Leader Kim Jong-Un went so far as to confine the population in October 2020 to prevent gobi desert mist about 2,000 kilometers spread the coronavirus.
Without manufacturing vaccines or accepting offers from other countries to immunize its population, Pyongyang has bet everything on its “zero covid” policy.
But, more than two years later, when much of the world already considers the pandemic to be over, in north korea everything collapsed with the spread of the omicron variant.
The government has recognized one and a half million cases of “fever” and 56 deathsbut the true scale of the outbreak is unknown in a country with severe shortages of medical supplies, weak detection and tracing capacity, and where the government has absolute control of information.
Proof of the seriousness of the situation, Kim announced that the country was going through “the greatest convulsion since its founding” in 1948, decreed massive quarantines. and even mobilized the army to deal with the flurry of cases.
But how could covid-19 enter and spread in what many consider to be the most hermetic country in the world?
From China, but… how?
The isolation due to the pandemic has further aggravated the already endemic shortage in North Korea, a country of some 25 million people unable to support itself due to its very limited resources for agricultural and industrial production.
“North Korea opened the border town of Sinuiju on the Yalu River in January, and materials and people began to flow in from China, as Pyongyang had asked for help due to the serious economic situation after two years of closure,” Professor Nam Sung-wook from Korea University in Seoul told BBC Mundo.
This limited opening could, according to this expert in intelligence and relations between North Korea and China, have facilitated a first entry of the virus into the country.
For his part, the correspondent of the EFE agency in Seoul, Andrés Sánchez Braun, cites two other possibilities in his analysis.
The first is that A smuggler will bring the virus to North Koreawhose 1,416 km border with China was heavily frequented – until the pandemic – by merchants crossing the Yalu River.
In some parts of the North Korea-China border, such as Sinuiju, the Yalu River is very shallow and easy to cross.
The other hypothesis is that it comes from “asymptomatic people who participated in authorized trade routes with China (railway and high seas)” somehow circumventing exhaustive disinfection processes.
The perfect storm”
For Go Myong-hyun, a research fellow at South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, it wasn’t how the virus entered the country earlier this year that mattered.
This, he assures, was only the first drop of what he calls “a perfect storm“, gestation in the following months.
Authorities “summoned large crowds of people to Pyongyang to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung [fundador del país, el 15 de abril] and the 90th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean military [el 25 de abril]”.
The two feastsbecame mass spread events” from covid-19, phrase Come on.
North Korea celebrated the 90th anniversary of the founding of its military in style on April 25.
And, in the expert’s opinion, they explain why Pyongyang is now the epicenter of covid-19 in the country.
The city of some 2.9 million people was the scene of the first major outbreaks reported by authorities last week.
And, after cases soared, Kim Jong-un directed the army’s medical corps to the country’s capital to “stabilize the supply of medicine”.
Who is responsible?
north korean leader pointed to both his cabinet and public health system officials “for his irresponsible attitude at work and his ability to organize and execute,” the state agency KCNA published on Monday.
Kim criticized the slowness in the distribution of drugs to local pharmacies (which justified the mobilization of the army to stabilize the supply) and the deficiencies in the storage of drugs.
Kim Jong-un during one of his usual field trips, in this case to a pharmacy after the recent covid outbreak
These and other shortcomings, according to North Korean authorities, have contributed to the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
For experts consulted by BBC Mundo, these accusations are part of the usual strategy of the North Korean government to looking for a “scapegoat” in times of crisis.
“It reflects the ideology of the North Korean leadership that the leader is supposed to be infallible and therefore, he is never blamed for political failures,” says researcher Go Myong-hyun.
He claims that North Korean leaders are responsible for the current situation, but “put the blame on third parties, which is another indication that the regime’s covid policy is not scientific but ideological”.
“There is going to be a purge”
“Unlike previous pandemics (SARS, influenza A, etc.), they were two years ahead to prepare the population for the transition from quarantine to mass vaccination. But they have stood firm on the zero covid policy, which attests to their ideological rigidity,” Go explains.
Professor Nam, for his part, predicts that someone will eventually pay the consequences.
“Inevitably there will be a purge of senior bureaucrats to appease the anger of the people.
And maintains that “the blame for this tragedy relies entirely on Kim Jong-un“.
He considers that, in recent months, the leader has contributed by his example to the relaxation in the community in the face of covid-19 by “attending parades and field visits without a mask, taking photos with a multitude of soldiers and ‘workers”.
Kim met with troops in late April, days after the army’s anniversary parade.
And, more importantly, the leader had the ultimate decision not to accept – for unknown reasons currently being debated among experts – vaccine supply offers from China and the UN’s Covax distribution program. , nor to request them from other countries or produce them independently.
So practically nobody is vaccinated in north korea.
This, added to the precarious conditions of the health centres, the shortage of medicines and supplies (North Korean deserters have told the BBC how serum is administered to patients in beer bottles and needles are reused until what they rust), among other factors, makes the late and massive spread of covid-19 in the country so dangerous.
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