As of Friday, there were still no visible signs that North Korea’s regime wanted to ask anyone for help in its first official coronavirus crisis. The Labor Party organ Rodong Sinmun gave the impression that ruler Kim Jong-un had everything under control. However, the news that the newspaper otherwise had to report did not sound rosy. A day after she reported a North Korean positive test for the omicron mutant from the capital Pyongyang for the first time during the pandemic, she also announced the first corona death.
Rodong Sinmun wrote: “On May 12 alone, around 18,000 people across the country developed a fever, and up to now up to 187,800 people are being isolated and treated. Six people have died (one of whom tested positive for the BA.2 subvariant of omicron) .” Kim Jong-un reiterated how important the national lockdown is now.
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North Korea has Covid-19. The party dictatorship suddenly admits this itself. So the health situation of the nation must be serious. The fact that the state media has always reported that there are no infections in North Korea was probably just a propaganda ploy. “There have been previous cases in rural areas,” writes Andrei Lankov, North Korea expert from Kookmin University in Seoul, when asked by SZ, “this is not the first lockdown.” The earlier ones targeted individual counties or cities. Now the situation is different. Much harder. Andrei Lankov: “This is the first lockdown in the capital.”
North Korea’s government always knew that it had to avoid an outbreak in the metropolis of Pyongyang. The health system is too weak for masses of lung patients. There are doctors, but very few medicines and medical instruments. That’s why Kim Jong-un has been sealing off his country from the outside world since the beginning of 2020 in a way that was never seen before.
North Korea survives thanks to China
Almost every trade was stopped and entry was largely forbidden. Even in the country you were no longer allowed to drive around at will. Living conditions deteriorated. Aid organizations and diplomats left Pyongyang. Since then, North Korea has survived primarily thanks to China. China sends oil by pipeline and grain or fertilizer by ship to Nampo or a few other port cities.
No North Korea observer knows exactly how the economic stress from the pandemic is affecting the country’s 25.5 million people. In any case, it did not stop Kim Jong-un himself from showing signs of strength with an unusually large number of missile tests since the beginning of the year. Perhaps Kim even enjoyed the isolation and became careless.
For example, Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute, observed tens of thousands of mask-less people crowded together on April 25 at the parade marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army. That could have been a so-called superspreader event, Cheong suspects on the NK News portal: “North Korea was too convinced of its quarantine capabilities. It held such a large military parade with many spectators, even though Omicron was raging in neighboring China.”
And now? North Korea has always turned down offers for vaccines. Unless the Kim regime has carried out a secret mass immunization, the entire population is unvaccinated. For this reason, North Korea cannot afford a large-scale spread. China-style lockdowns seem to be the way to go. “But the problem is that North Korea is much poorer and doesn’t have the logistics to get food and other necessities to the people,” Lankov says. Earlier in the pandemic, there were rumors that North Korean people were starving in lockdown. Andrei Lankov believes that if North Korea doesn’t get help, “the lockdown could turn into a real disaster.”