From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: When North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, acknowledged a Covid outbreak last week, he ordered his government to learn from China’s “success” fighting the virus.
China has used strict lockdowns, mass testing and vaccinations to keep cases low throughout the pandemic. But outside health experts say an attempt to mimic its pandemic response could send Kim’s impoverished country into an outright catastrophe.
The New York Times says North Korea cannot feed its own people in the best of times, and lacks the basic therapeutics and food supplies that China has mobilized for the extreme restrictions seen in cities like Wuhan, Xi’an and Shanghai. It does not have vaccines, either, so people have developed no immunity against the virus.
History: North Korea’s state rations system collapsed during a famine in the mid-1990s, which killed an estimated two million people. It has never recovered. The country is so isolated that the outside world didn’t know about the famine until the bodies of famished citizens started washing up along the shallow river on its border with China.
Details: The suspected number of new patients in North Korea has soared from 18,000 last Thursday to hundreds of thousands a day today. Without enough testing kits to accurately measure the outbreak, the country has relied on figures for the number of “people found with fevers” instead of positive test results.
