North Korea claims no coronavirus cases. Can it be trusted?

A soap factory making disinfectants in Pyongyang, North Korea, this month.Credit...Cha Song Ho/Associated Press

How could North Korea claim to not have a single corona-virus case while countries ?around the world stagger under the exploding epidemic?

?North Korea has taken some of the most drastic actions against the virus and did so sooner than most other nations. It sealed its borders in late January, shutting off business with neighboring China, which accounts for nine-tenths of its external trade. It clamped down on the smugglers who keep its thriving unofficial markets functioning. It quarantined all diplomats in Pyongyang for a month. ?The totalitarian state’s singular ability to control the movement of people? also bolsters its disease-control efforts.

But decades of isolation and international sanctions have ravaged? North Korea’s public health system, raising fears that ?it lacks the medical supplies to fight an outbreak, which many fear has already occurred.

“You can see immediately what’s going to happen if you get a surge of Covid-19 patients streaming in,” said Dr. Kee B. Park, ?a ?lecturer at Harvard Medical School who has worked alongside North Korean doctors to help improve the country’s health system. “It will overwhelm the system very quickly.”

Reference: NY Times