New Coronavirus News from 4 till 5 May 2022

'Stay vigilant': no let-up in North Korea's two-year Covid lockout [Financial Times, 5 May 2022]

by Christian Davies

Pyongyang claims to have avoided a big outbreak but experts warn its luck will eventually run out

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [e-mail] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.

https://www.ft.com/content/1116cb46-490a-47dc-9d81-70fc374e625c

North Koreans have been warned that “not even a tiny crack or mistake is allowed when it comes to emergency quarantining”, as the country persists with the extreme isolation policy that it imposed at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “Stay vigilant and strictly abide by quarantine regulations,” said a report this week in state newspaper Rodong Sinmun, reminding citizens to wear face masks and ventilate indoor areas. “Even if the mistake was as negligible as the tip of a needle, it could deal a critical blow to the country’s quarantine bases.
Emergency quarantining is currently the foremost priority in our country,” it added. While in China, panicked local authorities have imposed lockdowns in response to Omicron outbreaks in several cities, Pyongyang maintains that it has kept its population Covid-free by sealing the country’s borders. Information from inside North Korea is scarce, but the government is not believed to have confined citizens across the country to their homes. North Korea and Eritrea are the only two countries that have not initiated a Covid-19 vaccination programme.
Pyongyang’s claims that it has not recorded a single case have been widely ridiculed. But experts have argued that while it was highly unlikely that the country had no infections at all, no evidence had emerged of any large-scale outbreaks. Kee Park, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School who has worked inside North Korea, said the country had proved successful in keeping the virus out but that its approach would ultimately prove unsustainable. “A prolonged lockdown will lead to increased excess deaths — caused by poor nutrition, food shortages, increasing poverty, degradation of health systems and the loss of humanitarian aid — that will eventually exceed the number of deaths caused by the virus itself,” said Park. “China shows you can’t have even a limited opening without the virus spreading,” Park added. “North Korea is going to have to open and I think they’re going to be able to manage it, but they will need an aggressive vaccination programme.” North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un reacted decisively to the emergence of coronavirus in early 2020, sealing borders with China and Russia, tightening restrictions on internal movement and ejecting foreign diplomats and aid workers. Since then, the country has allowed only very limited transport of freight from China, which must pass through specially-constructed disinfection centres. Kim’s measures intensified the fallout from international sanctions imposed on North Korea in response to illicit nuclear and ballistic missile tests in 2017, as well as the effects of a series of droughts and floods. The North Korean regime has acknowledged the existence of a “food crisis”, even last year extolling the virtues of the meat of black swans reared in state-run duck farms. The country’s economy contracted 4.5 per cent in 2020, according to estimates from the Bank of Korea in Seoul, its sharpest decline since a famine killed millions of people in the 1990s. Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert and professor of history at Kookmin University in Seoul, said that the regime’s approach to the pandemic reflected a rational appraisal of the limitations of its own health system. “North Korea is perhaps the best-placed country worldwide to do a quarantine-based policy because they have controlled the domestic movement of the population for decades,” said Lankov. “They can close their borders completely without the need to worry about domestic political discontent and they are doing it because they assume that if there is an outbreak then many people [will] die because their health system will be unable to cope.”

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [e-mail] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/1116cb46-490a-47dc-9d81-70fc374e625c

More than two years after imposing the border lockout, Kim has not initiated a Covid-19 vaccination programme and has refused deliveries of Russian and Chinese vaccines offered through the World Health Organization’s Covax programme. Park said that North Korea’s rejection of vaccines did not reflect hostility to inoculations but rather its scepticism over the efficacy and safety of the jabs offered through Covax. “They’re not turning down all vaccines, they’re turning down the vaccines they feel are inferior,” said Park, noting that North Korea had also expressed concerns over the safety of AstraZeneca jabs. Before the pandemic struck, between 95 and 97 per cent of North Korea’s 25mn people were routinely immunised against diseases, including measles and polio, he added.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [e-mail] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/1116cb46-490a-47dc-9d81-70fc374e625c

I can say categorically that they do want vaccines,” he said. “If they’re provided with mRNA vaccines like Pfizer or Moderna and in a sufficient amount to vaccinate their population, including the booster dose, I think the reply will be different.” North Korea had the potential to develop its own vaccines, although it would struggle to test them on a Covid-free population, Park added. South Korean intelligence officials have accused North Korean hackers of attempting to steal information on coronavirus vaccines and treatments from companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax. Even if it somehow acquired tens of millions of mRNA vaccines, North Korea probably did not have the “cold-chain” infrastructure for them to be stored and distributed around the country, said a western diplomat.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [e-mail] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/1116cb46-490a-47dc-9d81-70fc374e625c

A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington outlined several factors that could encourage Pyongyang to change course. These included the easing of restrictions in China and South Korea, a worsening food crisis and the emergence of a new coronavirus variant. “Rather than ending the lockdown, the regime may manage ongoing health and food crises through small and sporadic openings . . . with the release of some shipments of humanitarian aid and a limited resumption of trade with China,” said the report. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute, warned that however Pyongyang chose to proceed, it could not keep the virus out forever. “China’s experience shows that what used to work against a less contagious strain may not work any more,” he said. “The North Koreans could get lucky for another few months but their luck will eventually run out.”

Anthony Fauci: Why China's COVID-19 Situation Is a 'Disaster' [Foreign Policy, 4 May 2022]

By Ravi Agrawal

The White House’s chief medical advisor assesses the world’s response to the pandemic.

In his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci has advised seven U.S. presidents on preventing the spread of a range of diseases. Over the last two years, amid the deadliest pandemic in our lifetimes, Fauci has also become the public face of the United States’ coronavirus response strategy, explaining rapidly changing developments and rules to an increasingly polarized nation.

Fauci mostly speaks about U.S. regulations but agreed to sit down with Foreign Policy for a more global look at the pandemic. I spoke with him on an episode of FP Live, the magazine’s platform for live journalism, on Monday, May 2. Some of the questions below were selected from submissions from FP subscribers. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Ravi Agrawal: You said last week that we are out of the “acute component” of the pandemic phase. In real terms, what does that mean for Americans?

Anthony Fauci: We are still in the middle of a pandemic, to be sure—there’s no confusion about that. But when I say we’re out of the acute fulminant stage right now, what I mean is that cases have gone down dramatically. Our numbers of deaths per day are down to one-tenth of what they were. We have many less hospitalizations, and the case numbers went way down from 900,000 to around 15,000 per day. Now, as we’ve seen before, we’re starting to see an uptick in cases, particularly with the new BA.2 variant. But what we are seeing is something that our colleagues in the United Kingdom and in some of the European countries have seen, where although the cases are starting to go up, they’re not going up in a very steep, fulminant way and they’re not associated with a concomitant increase in hospitalizations or the utilization of intensive care unit beds.

What that’s telling us is that 90-plus percent of our population has either been vaccinated and boosted or has gotten infected—or both. This is not protecting us specifically from infection, but it seems to be protecting us from that surge of hospitalizations that stressed the health care system during previous eras of this pandemic.

We hope that we don’t see a major uptick [in cases] as we get into the fall, but that remains to be seen. We’re going to have to wait and see, which is the reason why we’re still encouraging people to get vaccinated. If you’ve not been vaccinated or if you have been vaccinated and are eligible for a booster, make sure to get it. Now.

RA: Dr. Fauci, you chose not to go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend. President Joe Biden made the opposite choice. I imagine there is no right or wrong here. But what does this example tell us about individual choice? What do regular Americans take away as they choose how much risk to take on in their everyday lives?

AF: As long as there is virus that is circulating, people need to evaluate either themselves or with the help of their physician or their health care provider what the level of risk would be if they get infected.

I made a decision because I was weighing the risk and the benefit. You know, I’ve been to several White House Correspondents’ Dinners for fun, but it’s not a big deal if I don’t go, which I didn’t go this year. I’m 81 years old, I have a number of very important commitments that are coming up in the next week or so, and if I wound up getting infected, even if I didn’t get terribly ill, I’d have to cancel all of those commitments. So I made a personal decision based on my own evaluation of my risk, and that decision was not to take the chance.

A woman looks at burning funeral pyres during the COVID-19 pandemic in India

India’s Official COVID-19 Death Toll Is Still an Undercount

As the World Health Organization seeks to revise global figures, politics in New Delhi stand in the way.

ANALYSIS

How China’s COVID-19 Lockdowns Will Impact the Global Economy

With China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen effected, supply chain problems could get worse.
Q&A
CAMERON ABADI

RA: What’s your current guidance on mask-wearing? Is the United States easing up too quickly?

AF: Well, my guidance on that is really very much in parallel with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When you are in what we call a “green zone,” the level of infections, hospitalization, and hospital capacity is such that masking is not required. So I would not necessarily wear a mask if I were in a room with a few people and I knew what their vaccination status was.

But if I go into an unknown place, an indoor setting where there are a lot of people around, and I have no idea what their status is—again, given my age and my risk aversion because of my other responsibilities—I would wear a mask.

So I wouldn’t say it’s absolutely necessary and you must regulate someone to wear a mask. But I would say you make a personal decision that if you’re in a setting like that, wear a mask.

RA: I’m going to channel some of the questions we’ve received from our subscribers here. It’s fair to say the United States performed relatively poorly on the pandemic despite having one of the world’s most advanced health care systems. Knowing what you now know, what would you recommend America did differently?

AF: Well, what America could have done differently would have taken decades to fix. It isn’t a one thing for this pandemic that was specific. Our health care system has a great deal of disparities.

We have a very heterogeneous population, many of whom have a much greater risk of developing severe disease—mostly minority populations or brown and Black populations. Not only are they in occupational situations that put them at greater risk of getting exposed, but they have underlying conditions that are much more likely than you see in the general population: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, chronic lung disease. And that’s why they’ve suffered desperately greater than the general population.

Also, we have an uneven health care system. The access to good health care isn’t evenly distributed throughout the country, where it is in other nations that have more uniform health care systems. They’ve done much, much better than we have. Those are just a few of the reasons why, even though we’re a very rich country, even though we were deemed to be as well or better prepared than anyone else for a pandemic, we did quite poorly. We have almost a million deaths over a two-and-a-half-year period. That is very serious.

RA: Dr. Fauci, we’re Foreign Policy, so it’s only natural that we’re going to try to get you to look at other parts of the world as well. And I want to ask you about China and its so-called “zero-COVID” policy. Quite frankly, is it too stringent?

AF: Well, I think so, because if you are going to shut down a country and lock down, the reason to lock down is first to realize that’s a temporary measure, to give you enough time to properly vaccinate the overwhelming proportion of your population with a good vaccine, particularly the vulnerable, such as the elderly.

China apparently did not do that. They locked down, but the vaccine uptake, particularly among their elderly, is very poor. And the vaccines that they used, quite frankly, are not as effective as vaccines that are used in other parts of the world. So I understand the strategy of locking down, but you’ve got to do it with a purpose. If you just lock down and wait for the virus to disappear, it’s not going to happen. There has to be a purpose for that. And that purpose is to prepare yourself for the inevitability that the virus will enter your community.

RA: Given what you say, Dr. Fauci, at some level the United States and the West failed to vaccinate the rest of the world—or at least failed to deliver on some of the promises that were made. The World Health Organization (WHO) had set a target of about 70 percent of the world being vaccinated by the middle of this year. It’s way behind those targets. What do you make of that? Do you have regrets in terms of America’s response?

AF: That is a much, much more complicated situation than people realize. It goes well beyond providing doses to the developing world. The United States, quite frankly, has done very well.
We’ve given now, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of doses to 114 countries. We’ve pledged and/or given 1.2 billion doses by the end of this year. We’ve given $4 billion to COVAX.

What we found out, much to our dismay, is that the vaccine doses that were made available to the developing world were not being utilized. We’re in the somewhat paradoxical situation where the countries that need the vaccine are saying, “Don’t send us any more because we’re not able to implement and get it into people’s arms.” So what we need to do is go well beyond a plan to get vaccines in numbers to people but to help them with their infrastructure, to be able to get those vaccines administered to people.

RA: But of course, the infrastructure you’re describing globally could take decades to build around the world.

AF: Exactly. That’s why I said it’s not a problem you’re going to solve overnight by giving more vaccines. The infrastructure situation is going to take much, much longer than one season.

RA: So let me ask you a related question then. Turning to Ukraine, given the relatively low vaccination rates there, are you now worried about the conditions of war acting as an incubator for the next dangerous variant? And this holds true not only for Ukraine but also many other parts of the world, such as Yemen or Afghanistan.

AF: Well, you’re absolutely correct. And that gets back to the saying that we in public health have said for so long that a global pandemic can only be solved by a global response. You can’t have just some countries responding because then you give the virus the opportunity to proliferate, expand, and mutate and develop variants.

Whenever you have the disruption of anything from a natural disaster to a disruption of society by conflict, in this case the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that always leads to a disruption of health care systems, including how one can respond to a pandemic. But it goes well beyond Ukraine. You mentioned some of the other countries, even in sub-Saharan Africa, where you have, you know, less than 20 percent of some countries vaccinating their people, particularly when you have a high level of other diseases such as HIV/AIDS, in which the virus can have a particularly greater impact on people. That has secondary effects throughout the world because it gives the virus the opportunity to continue to spread from person to person.
And the more the virus replicates, the greater the opportunity you give it to mutate. And when it mutates, that’s when you get new variants.

RA: What can the developed world and global bodies such as WHO do to ensure that if there is a new variant, it’s detected quickly?

AF: Well, that is part of the pandemic preparedness and response plan, to be able to communicate and provide throughout the world the capability of doing rapid, real-time, real-world sequencing of variants as they arise so that one can prepare by modifying the vaccines to get an appropriate response.

The South Africans are doing an incredibly good job of being able to pick up these variants in real time. I mean, they’re as good as anyone throughout the world. In doing that, they’ve been able to point out the evolution of the omicron variant as well as the sublineages of omicron.

Other southern African countries, maybe not so well, and maybe in other areas, the Middle East and other parts of the world, they don’t have that capability. And as you suggested, and I agree with you, it really is the responsibility of the developed world to be able to partner with those countries, to provide with them and for them the ability to do real-time sequencing and surveillance.

RA: It strikes me that assessments of various countries and how they’ve handled the pandemic are essentially judgments based on snapshots in time. I remember a couple of years ago there were early winners in Asia, but then they ended up with disasters in the second year of the pandemic. And now that we’re in year three, it seems as if the decks are moving around again.
Given that you’ve had so much time to take this 30,000-foot view of the performance of different countries at this point of time, which countries do you think have done best?

AF: I would have named a couple that are now in real trouble. China did well in the beginning. It’s a disaster now, in Shanghai and likely in Beijing. Same with Taiwan.

Singapore did very well in the beginning. I think Australia and New Zealand have done very well. But remember, they have very special circumstances. When you have an island, you can actually close things off and be self-sufficient for a while until you get your people vaccinated.

RA: Many of our subscribers have been asking about the role of partisan politics and the polarized media. How did that impact your role as a scientist?

AF: Terribly so. I think if there was one fact that when people ask me, what was the thing that got in the way of an adequate response, certainly in the United States, it is the profound divisiveness in our society, where we seem to have forgotten that the common enemy is the virus. It’s really the propagation of untruths. And that’s very disturbing, where normalization of untruths becomes something that’s accepted, that people can say things that are completely false and completely misleading. It hurts me to say it even here in my own country.

RA: What was it like to be undermined and often contradicted by your own boss, former President Donald Trump?

AF: Well, that was very uncomfortable, obviously. I would have hoped that there would have been cooperation in addressing it as opposed to opposition. I took no great pleasure in having to be at odds with the president of the United States, but I had no choice.

RA: Do you worry about his reelection?

AF: No, I don’t get involved in politics, so I don’t worry. I worry about public health, not people’s reelection.

New Coronavirus News from 12 May 2022a

At Biden’s Summit, Other Nations Pledge Billions to Bolster Pandemic Response [The New York Times, 12 May 2022]

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON — President Biden and other leaders issued an urgent call on Thursday for the world to step up its fight against Covid-19, and countries including Germany, Canada and Japan pledged large sums to finance tests, therapeutics and vaccines — a commitment Mr. Biden could not make because Congress has refused to authorize new pandemic aid.

As the United States approached a harrowing milestone — one million American lives lost to the virus — fear of another deadly variant loomed large over the president’s second global Covid-19 summit, a virtual gathering co-hosted by Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal. But some countries were notably absent. China, in the thick of its own Covid crisis, did not attend. Russia, waging war against Ukraine, was not invited.

Senior Biden administration officials said the summit produced more than $3 billion in commitments toward the global response and toward efforts to prevent future pandemics. That is far short of the $15 billion that the World Health Organization says is needed. But the summit did lay the groundwork for a new global preparedness fund.

The gathering on Thursday unfolded in a very different climate compared with that of the first Covid summit in September. The war in Ukraine is sapping energy and money from donor nations. The global vaccination campaign has stalled. Testing has plummeted around the globe. Covid antiviral pills, available in the United States, are scarce in many low- and middle-income nations. Many attendees said Covid fatigue had become as big a danger as Covid itself.

“There’s still so much left to do; this pandemic isn’t over,” Mr. Biden said in his opening remarks, adding, “We have to prevent complacency.”

Global coronavirus cases by region
But the president’s tone was tepid compared with that of some of the other participants, who included heads of state, global health officials and philanthropic leaders. Several, including Dr. Joy St. John, the executive director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency, said climate change was speeding up the cycle of pandemics, making the next outbreak inevitable.

“The next virus may kill even more people and cause even greater economic disruption,” she warned.

Bill Gates, the software entrepreneur and philanthropist whose foundation has donated tens of millions of dollars to pandemic relief efforts — and who tested positive for the coronavirus this week — railed against global health inequities.

“We need to make more lifesaving tools and allocate them based on need rather than wealth,” Mr. Gates declared, adding, “We don’t have time to waste.”

There were some proverbial elephants in the room: China’s ongoing Covid crisis and the war in Ukraine were not discussed. But J. Stephen Morrison, an expert in global health at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the commitments by Group of 7 nations reflected the strengthening of bonds between countries allied against Russia in the Ukraine war.

Those pledges, he said, will pave the way for the World Bank to create a new global pandemic preparedness fund. The fund will be similar to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which was created two decades ago.

“It was the G7 that was the core of the H.I.V. response, and in some ways this is getting that same garage band back together,” Mr. Morrison said. Referring to the lack of congressional funding, he said, “Overall, not a bad outcome given the circumstances.”

Before the summit began, Mr. Biden ordered flags lowered to half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and military installations until Monday in commemoration of the nation’s death toll.

As of Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported more than 995,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States; a New York Times database put the figure at more than 997,000. But with heads of state, leaders of philanthropies and pharmaceutical executives attending the virtual gathering, Mr. Biden was ready to mark the coming moment.

Globally, the World Health Organization has said that nearly 15 million more people died during the first two years of the pandemic than would have been expected during normal times. That estimate far exceeds the official Covid death toll reported by countries.

Despite the gloomy predictions, summit participants did report some progress. Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told attendees that in Ghana, the percentage of eligible people fully vaccinated had doubled between December and April and now stood at 25.4 percent. Uganda has also seen a surge in vaccination.

“Now is not the time to back down; it is the time to push ahead,” she said, “even if this fight may drag on longer than any of us want.”

The White House instructed participants to come to Thursday’s summit with significant commitments — either financial or nonmonetary. One by one, over the course of four virtual sessions, philanthropies and drugmakers stepped up.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany pledged $1.5 billion, saying his country “wants to lead by example.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said his country would donate $732 million. South Korea offered $300 million.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative said it had negotiated agreements with drug manufacturers to make generic versions of Pfizer’s Covid antiviral, Paxlovid, available for less than $25 per course. Merck, whose Covid antiviral, molnupiravir, has already been distributed in generic form in 15 countries, said it would make two million courses of the drug available at a “best access price” to low- and middle-income nations.

The United States, which has already committed $19 billion to the global response, did not come entirely empty-handed. The Biden administration put forth a relatively small amount of money at the meeting: $200 million for the World Bank fund to prepare for future pandemics and $20 million for pilot projects to bring coronavirus tests and treatments to poor nations.

But that is much less than Mr. Biden hoped for. The president has asked Congress for $22.5 billion — including $5 billion to fight the pandemic globally — in emergency coronavirus aid, but the proposal is stuck on Capitol Hill, even as Congress hurries to approve $40 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine.

Lawmakers are still struggling to figure out how to advance a pared-down $10 billion coronavirus package. A group of Nobel laureates and former heads of state, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, called this week for Congress to fulfill Mr. Biden’s request.

“We’ve got to puncture the complacency about this, to make sure that people realize that if we don’t act, another variant is a possibility — and we don’t know how lethal it could be,” Mr. Brown, who is now the World Health Organization’s ambassador for global health financing, said in an interview this week.

The United States also made a significant nonmonetary commitment: The National Institutes of Health has agreed to license its “stabilized spike protein technology” — a crucial component of Covid vaccines and treatments — to companies through the Medicines Patent Pool, a global nonprofit backed by the W.H.O. that works to bring medicines to low- and middle-income nations at low cost.

The move is significant because it may lay the groundwork for other countries and companies to share their technologies, said Peter Maybarduk, who directs the global access to medicines program for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, and serves on the patent pool’s board.

While the United States has donated hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to poor nations, it has been less aggressive about sharing technology.

“One of the terrible injustices and major impediments in this pandemic has been the exclusive control of critical medical technology,” Mr. Maybarduk said. By working with the Medicines Patent Pool, he said, the Biden administration would be “not only sharing doses, but sharing knowledge, on the view that sharing doses is charity and sharing knowledge is justice.”

North Korea reports first Covid cases, Kim orders national lockdown [FRANCE 24 English, 12 May 2022]

The nuclear-armed country had never admitted to a case of Covid-19 and the government had imposed a rigid coronavirus blockade of its borders since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

But samples taken from patients sick with fever in Pyongyang "coincided with Omicron BA.2 variant", the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

Top officials, including leader Kim Jong Un, held a crisis politburo meeting on Thursday to discuss the outbreak and announced they would implement the "maximum emergency epidemic prevention system".

Kim "called on all the cities and counties of the whole country to thoroughly lock down their areas," KCNA reported, although details of the restrictions were not immediately given.

Kim told the meeting that the goal was to "quickly cure the infections in order to eradicate the source of the virus spread," according to KCNA.

Kim added that North Korea will "overcome the current sudden situation and win victory in the emergency epidemic prevention work".

It was unclear from the KCNA report how many Covid infections had been detected.

North Korea's crumbling health infrastructure would struggle to deal with a major outbreak, with its 25 million people not believed to be vaccinated, experts say.

"For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious," Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul said.

"Pyongyang will likely double down on lockdowns, even though the failure of China's zero-Covid strategy suggests that approach won't work against the Omicron variant."

No vaccines
North Korea has turned down offers of vaccinations from the World Health Organization, and China and Russia.

Accepting vaccines through the WHO's Covax scheme "requires transparency over how vaccines are distributed," Go Myong-hyun, researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies told AFP.

"That's why North Korea rejected it," Go said.

North Korea is surrounded by countries that have battled -- or are still fighting to control -- significant outbreaks of Omicron.

South Korea, which has high rates of vaccination, has recently eased almost all Covid-19 restrictions, with cases sharply down after an Omicron-fuelled spike in March.

Neighbouring China, the world's only major economy to still maintain a zero-Covid policy, is battling multiple Omicron outbreaks.

Major Chinese cities, including the financial capital Shanghai, have been under strict lockdowns for weeks.

It appears North Korea will try to avoid China's extreme measures like "virtually imprisoning residents in apartments", said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute.

But even more limited lockdowns would create a "severe food shortage and the same chaos China is now facing," he said.

Seoul-based specialist site NK News reported that areas of Pyongyang had already been locked down for two days, with reports of panic buying.

Nuke test?
The public emergence of Covid in Pyongyang could also have repercussions on North Korea's nuclear programme.

South Korea's hawkish new President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was sworn in Tuesday, has vowed to get tough with Pyongyang, after five years of failed diplomacy.

After high-profile talks collapsed in 2019, North Korea has doubled-down on weapons testing, conducting a blitz of launches so far this year, including intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Satellite imagery indicates North Korea is preparing to conduct a nuclear test, and the United States has warned this could come as soon as this month.

But the Covid-19 outbreak could potentially disrupt their military program, analysts said.

"There is a possibility of delaying the nuclear test in order to focus on overcoming the coronavirus," Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, told AFP.

But he said if public fears over an outbreak were to spread, Kim might go ahead with a test "to divert this fear to another place".

[INTERVIEW] North Korea's COVID-free claim nonsensical: virologist [The Korea Times, 12 May 2022]

By Jung Min-ho

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the world for more than two years. North Korea, however, is still completely free of the disease, according to its official data.

The latest data available on the World Health Organization website shows "there have been 0 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 0 deaths" in the isolated state between Jan. 3, 2020 and May 10 of this year.

Hakim Djaballah, former CEO of Institut Pasteur Korea and a virologist currently based in New York, believes that North Korea's COVID-free claim is most likely a lie.

"It is very hard to imagine any country being COVID free let alone North Korea," Djaballah told The Korea Times. "I do not believe their claim, given what has been happening near its borders."

Two weeks ago, China suspended railroad freight operations with North Korea "in light of the current epidemic situation" in the Chinese border city of Dandong. The city government ordered all residents to swiftly return home and stay there, but it did not give any other details.

North Korea has appeared to imitate China's zero-COVID strategy, which involves draconian lockdowns. But unlike China, North Korea lacks food supplies and government efficiency. Moreover, it is unclear how much of the country's population is vaccinated ― a critical factor for the pandemic to become endemic. Even if North Korea can pursue this strategy for a while, it would not be sustainable, Djaballah said.

"Given the current situation in North Korea, I doubt very much that they can successfully apply the zero-COVID policy as China has been doing," he said. "I find it counterproductive to continue with such policies for North Korea and even for China. I do not think that North Korea is capable of keeping the virus at bay, given what we know about its capabilities."

On Monday, North Korea called for making more efforts to prevent the spread of the virus amid a growing number of fever patients, though the possible cause of sickness has not been made clear. The Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the Workers' Party, urged the public not to let its guard down.

There is little information about vaccination in North Korea, including how many people, if anyone at all, have been vaccinated and what kind of vaccines may have been administered. But based on the situations in other countries, it is reasonable to assume that the virus will not disappear without infecting a certain number of people.

"I imagine that, with Omicron, many countries should have had at least 50-60 percent of their population already infected and recovered from it due to its mild symptoms … They're now on their way to dampen down COVID with the only fearful exception of the appearance of a new and deadly variant," Djaballah said. "The circulating Omicron and its variants have been helpful in pushing toward an equilibrium with the virus, hopefully sending it into hibernation and we will not hear about it for many years to come."

"In any case, North Korea can open its doors to independent observers to visit and assess the situation."

'Yoon should pay attention to health issues in North Korea'

Viruses are not affected by national borders, so an infectious disease threat in North Korea or China today could become a threat to the South tomorrow. This is the message Djaballah has for Yoon Suk-yeol, the new president of South Korea.

"Given the geo-location of both countries, if the virus is active in one, the chance of moving to the other country is very high," he said. "The current COVID situation would be a great opportunity to enhance bilateral healthcare collaborations and support with the North."

"I hope there will be a good dialogue between Yoon and North Korea's Kim [Jong-un] to help ease inter-Korean tensions, and at least collaborate on the COVID health crisis."

Yoon, who was sworn in Tuesday, promised that the government would continue to provide humanitarian aid to the North.

North Korea raises alarm after confirming 1st COVID-19 case [CBS17.com, 12 May 2022]

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea announced its first coronavirus infection more than two years into the pandemic Thursday as leader Kim Jong Un called for raising COVID-19 preventive measures to maximum levels.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said tests from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital Pyongyang confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant. North Korea had previously claimed a perfect record in keeping out COVID-19, a claim widely doubted by outside experts.

The country’s population of 26 million is believed to be mostly unvaccinated, after its government shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because those have international monitoring requirements.
KCNA said Kim called a meeting of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party’s Politburo where members decided to raise its anti-virus measures. Kim, during the meeting, called for officials to stabilize transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible.

COVID-19 in NC: 17K new cases during past week; hospitalizations up 10%

Despite the decision to elevate anti-virus steps, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the country’s defense postures to avoid any security vacuum.

Kim said officials must also formulate steps to ease any public inconveniences and other negative situations that could flare as a result of the boosted anti-pandemic measures. Kim said that “the single-minded public unity is the most powerful guarantee that can win in this anti-pandemic fight,” KCNA said.

North Korea’s announcement of the infections came after NK News, a North Korea-focused news site, cited unidentified sources who said authorities had imposed a lockdown on Pyongyang residents. South Korea’s government said it couldn’t confirm the report.

North Korea was one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged virus case. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts. In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks.

Experts said a major COVID-19 outbreak would have devastating consequences because of North Korea’s poor health care system and could possibly trigger instability when combined with other problems like serious food shortages.

North Korea’s previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020 — before the coronavirus spread around the world — North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of “national existence”. It quarantined people with symptoms resembling COVID-19 and all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years and is even believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

Raleigh teen on his own after dad dies of COVID-19 as US nears 1M coronavirus deaths
The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and crippling U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea in January tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and China’s Dandong, but China announced a halt to the trade last month as it deals with a spread of COVID-19 in Dandong.

It’s unusual for North Korea to admit the outbreak of any infectious disease though Kim has occasionally been candid about national and social problems and policy failures.

During a flu pandemic in 2009 when the country was ruled by his father, Kim Jong Il, North Korea said that nine people in Pyongyang and the northwestern border town of Sinuiju had contracted the flu. Some outside experts said at the time the admission was aimed at winning outside aid.

Experts say Kim Jong Un still hasn’t publicly asked for any aid, including COVID-19 vaccines, from the United States and South Korea amid the prolonged stalemate in nuclear diplomacy.

Copyright 2022 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

North Korea declares 'major national emergency' as first case of Covid-19 identified, state media reports [CNN, 12 May 2022]

By Gawon Bae and Helen Regan

(CNN)North Korea has identified its first ever case of Covid-19, according to state media, which called the situation a "major national emergency."

It's unclear how many infections have been detected but state-run news agency KCNA reported on Thursday that cases of the Omicron variant had been found in the capital Pyongyang.

Samples collected from a group of people experiencing fevers on May 8 tested positive for the highly contagious Omicron variant, KCNA reported.

An outbreak of Covid-19 could prove dire for North Korea. The country's dilapidated health care infrastructure is unlikely to be up to the task of treating a large number of patients with a highly infectious disease.

North Korea had not previously acknowledged any coronavirus cases, though few believe that a country of around 25 million people has been spared by a virus that has infected millions worldwide.

On Thursday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered lockdown measures in all cities and directed the distribution of medical supplies the party had reportedly stocked in case of a Covid emergency, according to KCNA.

Kim also chaired a meeting of the country's powerful politburo, which agreed to implement "maximum" emergency anti-epidemic measures, though it is unclear what they involve.

According to KCNA, the politburo criticized the country's anti-epidemic sector for "carelessness, laxity, irresponsibility and incompetence," saying it "failed to respond sensitively" to increasing Covid-19 cases across the world, including in neighboring regions.

Kim said the country would overcome the "unexpected Covid-19 outbreak," KCNA reported.
To date, North Korea has been able to prevent a major outbreak of Covid-19 cases thanks to a series of draconian public health measures.

North Korea's borders have been sealed since January 2020 to keep the virus at bay, despite the knock-on effects on trade with Beijing, an economic lifeline the impoverished country needs to keep its people from going hungry.

Isolated and impoverished North Korea is not known to have imported any coronavirus vaccines, though it is eligible for the global Covid-19 vaccine sharing program, Covax. In February, Covax reportedly scaled back the number of doses allocated to North Korea because the country failed to arrange for any shipments, according to Reuters.

Also in February, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea Tomás Ojea Quintana called on the international community to provide North Korea "with 60 million doses of vaccinations to cover at least two shots of the entire population."

North Korea confirms 1st COVID outbreak, Kim orders lockdown [ABC news, 12 May 2022]

By KIM TONG-HYUNG and HYUNG-JIN KIM

North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak of the pandemic

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world. The size of the outbreak wasn’t immediately known, but it could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say the North, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

In response, leader Kim Jong Un called for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading, KCNA said.

The North's government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because those have international monitoring requirements.

Kim during a ruling party Politburo meeting called for officials to stabilize transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing the inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. Kim said “single-minded public unity is the most powerful guarantee that can win in this anti-pandemic fight,” KCNA said.

Despite the decision to elevate anti-virus steps, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the country’s defense postures to avoid any security vacuum.

North Korea’s announcement of the infections came after NK News, a North Korea-focused news site, cited unidentified sources who said authorities had imposed a lockdown on Pyongyang residents. South Korea’s government said it couldn’t confirm the report.

The North will likely double down on lockdowns, even though the failure of China’s “zero-COVID” approach suggests that approach doesn’t work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University.

“For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious,” Easley said. “This does not mean North Korea is suddenly going to be open to humanitarian assistance and take a more conciliatory line toward Washington and Seoul. But the Kim regime’s domestic audience may be less interested in nuclear or missile tests when the urgent threat involves coronavirus rather than a foreign military.”

North Korea’s previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020 — before the coronavirus spread around the world — North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of “national existence." It quarantined people with symptoms resembling COVID-19, all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is even believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations – Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands – have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's confirmed outbreak comes as China — its close ally and trading partner — battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

North Korea in January tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and China’s Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

Most of the Liaoning city of Dandong has been under lockdown since late April, and in another city, Yingkou, 78 new cases were found Wednesday. Another border province, Jilin, had a major outbreak earlier with tens of thousands of cases, but that has largely receded.

The outbreaks in northeastern China have been overshadowed by the huge outbreak that has locked down Shanghai for weeks, as well as a small outbreak in Beijing that has prompted a raft of pandemic-related restrictions in the nation’s capital.

It’s unusual for North Korea to admit the outbreak of any infectious disease though Kim has occasionally been candid about national and social problems and policy failures.

During a flu pandemic in 2009 when the country was ruled by his father, Kim Jong Il, North Korea said that nine people in Pyongyang and the northwestern border town of Sinuiju had contracted the flu. Some outside experts said at the time the admission was aimed at winning outside aid.

Experts say Kim Jong Un still hasn’t publicly asked for any aid including COVID-19 vaccines from the United States and South Korea amid the prolonged stalemate in nuclear diplomacy.