“Six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread ‘explosively’ across North Korea, state media said Friday, a day after the country acknowledged a Covid-19 outbreak for the first time in the pandemic,” the AP reports.
“North Korea likely doesn’t have sufficient Covid-19 tests and said it didn’t know the cause of the mass fevers. But a big coronavirus outbreak could be devastating in a country with a broken health care system and an unvaccinated, malnourished population.”
The Economist: “North Korea lacks the testing and tracing infrastructure that other countries have built over the past two years. Its health-care sector suffered from serious underinvestment even before the pandemic. It does not have enough equipment and medical staff. Hospitals do not have regular power, clean water or proper sanitation. Two years of closed borders have depleted supplies of medicine, much of which is imported. It is unclear how much oxygen or how many ventilators the country has available. And pre-existing conditions make North Koreans especially susceptible to covid-19. Tuberculosis, which worsens the effects of the virus, is rampant. So is malnutrition.”
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