For more than two years, North Korea managed to prevent the arrival of covid-19, according to their records.
He did it by taking his isolation to the extreme: since January 2020 does not allow anyone to enter the country – not even North Koreans – and has reinforced the fences and border posts, where the soldiers are ordered to shoot to everyone who approaches.
It also stores and disinfects all products imported from China for weeks to ensure that they do not have even the slightest trace of the virus.
Leader Kim Jong-Un reached the point of confining the population in October 2020 to prevent the haze coming fromthe Gobi desert about 2.000 kilometres spread the coronavirus.
Without manufacturing vaccines or accepting offers from other countries to immunize its population, Pyongyang bet everything on its “zero covid” policy.
But, more than two years later, when much of the world considers the pandemic over, in North Korea everything has fallen apart with the spread of the omicron variant.
The government has recognized one and a half million cases of “fever” and 56 dead, but The real extent of the epidemic is unknown in a country with serious shortages of medical supplies, poor detection and tracking capacity, and where the government has absolute control of information.
Evidence of the seriousness of the situation is that Kim announced that the country is going through “the greatest upheaval since its founding” in 1948, has decreed massive quarantines and even h The army has been mobilized to deal with the wave of cases.
But how could the covid-19 and spread in what many consider the most hermetic country of the world?
From China, but… how?
Isolation due to the pandemic further aggravated the already endemic shortage in North Korea, a country of some 25 millions of inhabitants incapable of self-sufficiency due to their very limited resources for agricultural and industrial production.
“North Korea opened in January the border city of Sinuiju on the river Yalu and materials and people began to enter from China, since Pyongyang had requested help due to the serious economic situation after two years of closure, ”he tells BBC Mundo Professor Nam Sung-wook of Korea University in Seoul.
This limited opening p It was believed, according to this expert in intelligence and relations between North Korea and China, to have facilitated the first entry of the virus into the country.
For his part, the EFE Agency correspondent in Seoul, Andrés Sánchez Braun, cites two other possibilities in his analysis.
The The first is that some smuggler took the virus to North Korea, whose border is 1.110 km with China was very frequented -until the pandemic- by merchants who they crossed the Yalu River.
The other hypothesis is that came from “asymptomatic people who have participated in the permitted trade routes with China (railroad and high seas)” somehow mocking the e exhaustive disinfection processes.
“perfect storm”
For Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the South Korean Asan Institute for Political Studies, the important thing was not how the virus entered to the country at the beginning of the year.
That, he assures, was only the first drop of what he calls “a perfect storm”, gestated in the following months.
The authorities “ summoned large crowds of people in Pyongyang to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung and the 90th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean Armed Forces [el 25 de abril]”.
Both celebrations “became mass propagation events” of the covid-19, Go statement.
And, in the opinion of the expert, they explain why Pyongyang is today the epicenter of the covid-19 in the country.
The city of some 2.9 million inhabitants was the scene of the first major outbreaks reported last week by authorities.
And, after the cases skyrocketed, Kim Jong-un directed the army’s medical corps to the country’s capital to “stabilize the supply of medicines.”
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Who is responsible?
The North Korean leader singled out both his cabinet and those responsible for the public health system “for their irresponsible work attitude and their capacity for organization and execution,” the state agency KCNA published on Monday.
Kim criticized the slow pace in the distribution of medicines to local pharmacies (which justified mobilizing the army to stabilize the supply) and the deficiencies in the storage of drugs.
These and other shortcomings, according to the North Korean authorities, would have contributed to the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
For the experts consulted by BBC Mundo, these accusations are part of the usual strategy of the North Korean government of looking for a “scapegoat” in times of crisis.
“This reflects the ideology of the leadership zgo of North Korea according to which the leader is supposedly infallible and, therefore, he is never blamed for policy failures”, says the researcher Go Myong-hyun.
Assures that the North Korean leadership is responsible for the situation current, but “shifts the blame to third parties, which is another indication that the regime’s covid policy is not scientific but ideological.”
“There will be a purge”
“Unlike previous pandemics (SARS, influenza A, etc.), had two years in advance in which to prepare the population for a transition from quarantine to mass vaccination. But they remained firm in the zero covid policy, which attests to their ideological rigidity, ”says Go.
Professor Nam, for his part, predicts that someone will end up paying the consequences.
“Inevitably there will be a purge of high-ranking bureaucrats to appease the anger of the people”.
And he maintains that “the blame for this tragedy falls completely on Kim Jong-un“.
Considers that, in recent months, the leader has contributed to the relaxation with his example in the environment against covid- by “attending parades and field visits without a mask, taking photos with a multitude of soldiers and workers.”
And, more importantly, the leader had the ultimate decision not to accept -for unknown reasons that are currently being debated among experts- China’s vaccine supply deals and the UN’s Covax distribution program, nor solicit them from other countries or produce them autonomously.
So practically nobody is vaccinated in North Korea.
This, added to the precarious conditions of health centers, the shortage of medicines and supplies (North Korean defectors told the BBC how serum is administered in beer bottles to patients and needles are reused until they rust), among other factors, is what makes the late and massive spread of covid so dangerous-15 in the country.
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