Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, May 20, 2022

Worst case scenario

Kim Jong Un has, to widespread surprise, announced that the DPRK is facing an explosive Covid epidemic. The surprise, of course, is not that it is happening, but they he has admitted it. The official story out of North Korea is that they had succeeded in keeping the virus out of the country entirely, by closing borders, until recently. Then this catastrophe happened.


Many people are skeptical of that account and believe the virus must have been in the country earlier, but I'm inclined to think it may be true because whenever it arrived, we would almost certainly have seen widespread infection, sickness and death. The country has no capacity to test, trace contacts, or isolate cases, and as far as we know no-one is vaccinated, with the possible exception of the Kim family and his closest associates. Even they can only have received the Chinese vaccine, which is not very effective.


The population is poorly nourished, the health care system is woefully inadequate, and the result is that with the highly contagious Omicron variant appearing in a population with zero prior immunity to the coronavirus and generally weak immune systems, the virus will spread like wildfire and the case fatality rate will be substantially higher than we have seen elsewhere. It is probably much too late for the North Koreans to implement effective mitigation measures, so what we will now see what happens in a country that has essentially zero response to the initial wave of the epidemic. Or I should say we might see it, getting accurate information about what happens in the DPRK is very difficult. 


Anyway, if Kim will accept the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, in my opinion we should certainly provide them. It probably won't make Kim behave any more nicely, but it will show that we, at least, have humane values. Kim's judgement in this matter has been catastrophically wrong, but he probably won't pay a price for it personally. Unless, of course, he catches the virus.

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