North Korea’s Pandemic ‘Miracle’ Was a Deadly Lie, Report Says

Asia Pacific|North Korea’s Pandemic ‘Miracle’ Was a Deadly Lie, Report Says

North Korea has long claimed that it defeated the Covid-19 pandemic without vaccines, losing only 74 lives in what it called “a miracle unprecedented in the world’s public health history.” But a report released on Tuesday said the ​government ​lied and left many of its people to die without proper health care or access to outside help.

As the pandemic raged, the already ​woeful economic and public health conditions of ordinary North Koreans ​rapidly worsened as a result of their government’s efforts, especially in the first two years, to deny that the virus was spreading, according to a report ​compiled by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and the George W. Bush Institute​. Pyongyang’s repeated rejections of international ​help and its draconian crackdown on the movement of people made their suffering worse, the report said.

The authors said their report was based on rare interviews with 100 people inside isolated North Korea — conducted by an outside intermediary that engaged them in “casual, in-person conversations.” Their findings provide a rare glimpse into the scale of human distress inside ​the country during the ​pandemic. One woman interviewed for the report ​said that there were so many deaths in nursing homes in the winter of 2020​ that “there weren’t enough coffins.”

“Deaths and suffering due to suspected Covid-19 cases were widespread in North Korea starting in 2020,” well before ​it ​reported its first outbreak in May 2022​, the report said.

“The government’s negligence was nothing short of abominable​,” it noted.

Citizens had virtually no access to vaccines, no antiviral medications, and minimal supply of personal protective equipment, although they had been available globally for more than a year, ​the report said. Nearly 90 of the 100 interviewees said they had not been tested for Covid. Nearly 40 reported not having received a vaccine during the pandemic. And 92 said they suspected that they or people they knew had been infected, though there was no way to be sure.

Local health officials misreported Covid deaths and diagnoses because of fear of punishment for not aligning with the government’s claim that there were no cases, it said. So did citizens, because reporting that they were sick did not bring help from the government but rather forced detention or even collective lockdowns, either of which would have worsened already-acute food shortages.