The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. But it’s only in recent days, in May 2022, that the secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has reported its first confirmed cases of the virus.

While it may seem somewhat astounding that a country has managed to get so far into the pandemic without an outbreak, North Korea has reportedly had its borders sealed since January 2020, with no movement in or out of the country. So it is plausible that they’ve had no COVID until now.

But now, the country, which has a population of roughly 26 million people, looks to be facing a very sizeable and rapidly-spreading outbreak of the omicron variant. As of May 17, 1.4 million cases of “fever” had been reported, with 56 deaths since late April. The country is treating fever as indicative of COVID infection owing to reported shortages of testing supplies.

Of course, we don’t know how many of these cases of fever are definitely COVID, which in theory could lead to an overestimation of case numbers. At the same time, a proportion of cases are likely to be asymptomatic, and a lack of reporting coupled with limited surveillance means there’s a likelihood of under-reporting. Either way, these numbers are unlikely to be accurate.

There has been some testing taking place, with an unspecified number of omicron cases confirmed. But ultimately, there are huge gaps in our knowledge about this outbreak. This includes the index case – the case which was the source of this outbreak.

North Korea is ill-equipped for a COVID outbreak
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the need for national and global presentations of high-quality real-time data, along with rigorous and mass-scale testing infrastructure, to underpin surveillance and healthcare decision-making. North Korea doesn’t appear to have any of that in place.

Read more - https://theconversation.com/covid-has-reached-north-korea-threatening-a-humanitarian-emergency-183158