CNN
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North Korea’s first-reported Covid-19 outbreak is the “greatest turmoil” to befall the country since its founding more than 70 years ago, according to its leader Kim Jong Un, as the isolated and impoverished nation scrambles to curb the spread of a highly transmissible virus that risks causing a major humanitarian crisis.
North Korea reported 21 more deaths and 174,440 new “fever cases” Friday, according to state media KCNA, though it did not specify how many of the deaths and cases were linked to Covid, likely due to the country’s extremely limited testing capacity.
The climbing death toll and surging “fever cases” come after North Korea said Thursday it had identified its first ever case of Covid-19 – an alarming development for a country with one of the world’s most fragile public health systems and a largely unvaccinated population.
But given the opaque nature of the regime and the country’s isolation from the world – a trend that has only exacerbated since the pandemic – it is extremely difficult to assess the real situation on the ground.
Foreign diplomats and aid workers had fled North Korea en masse in 2021 due to shortages of goods and “unprecedented” restrictions on daily life, making it all the more impossible to obtain information from the country other than through official state media.
But North Korean state media reports have been vague, and many important questions remain unanswered, including the country’s vaccine coverage and the lockdown’s impact on the livelihood of its 25 million people.
Here is what we know, and what we don’t know about the outbreak:
North Korean authorities have not announced the cause of the outbreak.
North Korea’s borders have been tightly sealed since January 2020 to keep the virus at bay, making the so-called “hermit nation” even more isolated from the world. It even declined invitations to send teams to compete at the Tokyo and Beijing Olympics, citing the threat of Covid-19.
And as new variants began to emerge, it stepped-up those efforts, cutting off nearly all trade with China – the country’s biggest trading partner and economic lifeline for the Kim regime – with imports from Beijing dropping 99% from September to October 2020.
It remains unclear how the virus slipped through the country’s tightly-sealed borders.
When KCNA reported on the first identification of Covid-19 in the country on Thursday, it did not even specify how many infections had been defected. It simply said samples collected from a group of people experiencing fevers on May 8 had tested positive for the highly contagious Omicron variant.
By Friday, KCNA was reporting that 18,000 new “fever cases” and six deaths were recorded on Thursday, including one who tested positive for the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.
“A fever whose cause couldn’t be identified explosively spread nationwide since late April,” the newspaper said. “As of now up to 187,800 people are being isolated.”
On Saturday, KCNA said a total of 524,440 people had reported “fever” symptoms between late April and May 13. Among them, 280,810 people were still being treated in quarantine, while the rest had recovered.
An outbreak of Covid-19 could prove disastrous for North Korea. The country’s dilapidated health care infrastructure and lack of testing equipment is unlikely to be up to the task of treating a large number of patients with a highly infectious disease.
North Korea’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to share information also poses a challenge.
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Read More: North Korea’s Covid outbreak: What we know and don’t know