Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire in North Korea

JUST OVER a week after North Korea recorded its first case of covid-19, on May 8th, the official case count had risen to 168 infections and one death. That would be a creditable feat of containment were it not for the nearly 1.5m cases of “fever”, responsible for another 56 deaths, that the country has also reported. Given the speed of the spread, it is all but certain that North Korea is being ravaged by an outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron variant.

One theory for the two-tier system of reporting cases is that authorities are using “fever” as a ploy to disguise the seriousness of the crisis. But the more likely, and worrying, reason is that the regime is using temperature as a proxy because it lacks the testing infrastructure necessary to confirm diagnoses of covid.