This is what happens when you have no one vaccinated against Covid-19.
North Korea has an "explosive" COVID outbreak and 0% vaccination rate
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/17/north-korea-explosive-covid-outbreak
North Korea officially claimed zero COVID-19 cases until last Thursday. Now, Pyongyang says
1.2 million people have feverish, COVID-like symptoms, 50 people have died and the entire country is under lockdown.
Why it matters: North Korea has a 0% vaccination rate and meager health facilities, and it was already struggling to feed its population. Leader Kim Jong-un has called the outbreak the "greatest turmoil" since North Korea's founding, but he has yet to accept foreign assistance.
Driving the news: At an emergency Politburo meeting on Sunday, Kim scolded officials for the “irresponsible” execution of the quarantine policy and blamed them for shortages of medicines, according to state media. He has
started wearing a mask in public.
- State media reported Thursday that some samples taken from symptomatic people in Pyongyang came back positive for a highly contagious Omicron sub-variant.
- Since then, the number of "fever" cases has ballooned to over 1 million. It would be impossible to verify the official figures even if North Korea had the capacity for mass testing, but Pyongyang has called the spread "explosive."
Between the lines: "I think there’s probably an effort here to get on top of the narrative and to show Kim is addressing this head-on, while also pushing blame down the chain to the lower levels," says Jenny Town, director of the Stimson Center’s 38 North program.
- State media has acknowledged the virus is spreading in Pyongyang, and "it has probably hit some of the elites,” she adds.
- An out-of-control virus is a "nightmare scenario" for the Kim regime and could be a deeply destabilizing event, says Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior U.S. official.
How it happened: North Korea responded to the pandemic as it did to Ebola, MERS and SARS: "They sealed their borders and waited for the pandemic to die off," says Kee Park, a neurosurgeon and lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
- Severing most trade with neighboring China meant taking a major economic hit, and it put the North's ideology of "juche," or self-reliance, to the test.
- North Korean officials were highly confident until recently that the "extreme zero-COVID" policy was working, says Park, who has a license to practice in North Korea, has visited more than 20 times and leads a program to support medical care there.
- "There was really no need, in North Korea's eyes, to entertain external assistance," including the AstraZeneca vaccines offered by the COVAX initiative, he says.
Now that the Omicron variant has "breached their defenses" and spread throughout much of the country, North Korea is ill-equipped to deal with it, Park says.
- Even at Pyongyang's top teaching hospital, there are perhaps only a dozen ventilators, he says. Medical facilities outside the capital city are much more limited.
- North Korea does have two things going for it: a high number of doctors per capita and a population that is accustomed to following orders from above, says a humanitarian worker with extensive experience in the country.
- But those doctors have limited training and no experience caring for COVID patients. Transportation is so poor, particularly outside of Pyongyang, that it will be difficult to get sick people to hospitals and clinics, especially during a lockdown, says the humanitarian source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
"I shudder to think about a prolonged lockdown in North Korea, the human cost of that. The country's already food insecure. And what it means is we have to give them assistance immediately," says Park.
- In addition to vaccinesand essential medications, North Korea will need food, the humanitarian source adds.
- "We’re coming into the lean season in North Korea, with a drought there and almost no international support. So I’m very concerned."
- “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is at least a quiet call for assistance — nothing announced publicly but just done through their diplomatic channels over the next couple of weeks,” the source says.
Yes, but: Accepting international aid is always politically sensitive for North Korea, and officials could worry letting in people and supplies will also bring more cases, the Stimson Center’s Town says.
- "I don’t see them suddenly saying, 'Oh, well we have COVID now so let’s open everything back up,'" she says. "I think there's still going to be an abundance of precaution, even if it’s counter-intuitive and possibly detrimental to the situation."
- North Korea is particularly unlikely to accept direct help from South Korea, which has offered to send vaccines, medical personnel and other supplies.
But the very public pronouncements about the severity of the situation could be a step toward accepting aid, the humanitarian source says, adding that the UN will likely be the key player in any such effort.
- Cha, of CSIS, says that in private communications with nongovernmental organizations and medical groups, North Korea has expressed interest in mRNA vaccines.
What to watch: If North Korea does accept help from South Korea and the U.S., even indirectly through the UN, “it would be interesting to see if this humanitarian effort would open up space for diplomacy on the nuclear issue,” Cha adds.
- The WHO said Monday that it had not received any data from North Korea about the outbreak but confirmed that the country had not begun vaccinations.
Some follow-up on North Korea... every day the situation becomes worse.
Here's what we know about North Korea's COVID outbreak — and its ability to handle it
NPR -
https://tinyurl.com/233t4ntu
It's been more than two years since the pandemic began and in that time North Korea has claimed to have had zero COVID cases. But now the country's government has said it is experiencing its first outbreak, though it is still not labeling what people have as COVID.
On Wednesday,
North Korean state media said more than 1.7 million people had experienced fevers and 62 people had died since late April — but those numbers are hard to confirm, according to journalist Jean Lee, who specialized on North Korea.
North Korea does not have enough COVID tests to confirm that all the patients have the virus, and the country of 26 million people has still not reported any official cases to the World Health Organization, Lee said. The lack of tests and the fact that there are no outside observers inside North Korea make getting an accurate picture of what's happening inside the country — and confirming all cases of fever are indeed the coronavirus — extremely difficult.
"Kim Jong Un is painting this as the first outbreak of COVID in North Korea, but I find that very hard to believe because North Korea shares a very long border with China, and there would have been many people going across the border between China and North Korea in the early weeks of the outbreak in 2019 and early 2020," Lee said. "And so it's hard to imagine that the virus didn't didn't make its way to Pyongyang."
Why North Korea would admit to an outbreak now
Lee said that acknowledging a COVID outbreak now could be a political move by Kim.
"He has spent his energy shutting the world out during a period when he needed to focus on boosting his legacy, and now I think his attention is shifting," she said. "And part of this might be a calculation to re-engage with the outside world.
It is also possible that COVID has reached a point where it is no longer feasible for North Korea to ignore or deal with it on its own, Lee said. But it could be the case, she added, that Kim sees the election of Yoon Suk Yeol as South Korea's new president, and an upcoming summit between Yoon and President Biden, as an opportunity to re-establish communication, especially if North Korea says it has an outbreak.
North Korea has refused help in the past though. The country declined millions of vaccines that were offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX initiative earlier in the pandemic, and as NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports, the country has not publicly accepted offers of vaccines and medical assistance from China and South Korea since this outbreak began.
"There is speculation that they don't trust the drugs, or they don't want to be seen to be depending on outside help," Kuhn said.
Can North Korea handle an outbreak on its own?
North Korea's government has declared a nationwide emergency, and a lockdown has been instituted within the country as its military is working to distribute medicine.
This, along with outspoken criticism from Kim of how North Korean officials have handled the outbreak, raises questions on whether the country has the medical infrastructure to respond to the crisis.
Previously, North Korean officials have said they are not well-equipped to deal with this, Kuhn said, noting that many hospitals in rural areas of the country lack ventilators and other basic equipment, as well as essential utilities including water and electricity.
There's also the issue of malnutrition in the country, which is a chronic issue facing nearly 40% of the population.
"They don't have the kind of nutrients that the average human being needs to withstand illness, and on top of that they're not vaccinated," Lee said. "It's hard for me to imagine how without vaccination, without medication, without robust health, how they will survive even a milder variant."
