North Korea recently declared victory over COVID-19. Kim Jong Un praised the country, calling their fight against the virus the “greatest miracle” in global health. The country reported 74 deaths from the virus and about 5 million infections, which, if true, would be the world’s lowest death rate from the pandemic. They did this without a vaccine and with a health system that most experts call dilapidated. This announcement has been met with skepticism for those in the North Korean aid community.

The Daily NK reported that as the country touted its miraculous victory over COVID-19, that the country has been clamping down internally on disease and population control measures.

“According to multiple sources in North Korea, North Korean authorities are limiting the issuance of documents needed for inter-regional travel, including travel certificates, business trip certificates, approval numbers and quarantine confirmations,” according to the August 4 report.

When North Korea first announced their outbreak in May, Crossing Borders sounded the alarm. We petitioned the church in the US and globally to pray for North Korea. We were concerned about what COVID-19 might do to the North Korean people who have been malnourished for decades. Studies have shown how malnutrition degrades a person’s immune system over time. 

A few members of our US staff were visiting Elim House in South Korea when news broke of  North Korea’s COVID-19 outbreak. They were able to talk to refugees and aid groups on the ground, all of whom supported our suspicions that North Korea was grossly underreporting their death toll. We spoke to refugees with contacts in North Korea who were telling them that the amount of suffering is akin to the famine of the 1990s.

Kim Jong Un himself used the word “miracle” in describing his country’s defeat of COVID-19 because that is indeed what it would take for the country to overcome the disease. It is within the realm of possibility that the lack of obesity and the level of control the government has, can yield a more positive result against the virus. But it is much more likely that North Korea is not telling the truth given their history of deception both internally to its citizens and to the world. 

Choi Jung-hun, a North Korean defector who served as a doctor before fleeing in 2011, was quoted in this CNN article as reflecting on the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004 that “North Korea had no ability to test for the disease, so officially it recorded zero infections. According to 38 North, likely due to inadequate testing supplies and/or capabilities, only a handful of COVID-19 cases have officially been confirmed, with the rest attributed to an unidentified “fever” since the onset of this year’s outbreak.

Exactly what is going on in the country remains a mystery. The sources we sighted on the ground also only give us a limited picture of what the pandemic is doing throughout the whole country. And if the North Korean government is trying to conceal the truth about COVID to the outside world, it certainly is attempting to do the same inside the country as well. This means that, as the country monitors its citizens, it will also monitor internal communications about the pandemic as well. Regular citizens will not be able to tell a friend in a neighboring city what is happening to them. It will take years, if not decades, for the world to get a picture of the damage wrought by the pandemic.

This is also what happened during the North Korean famine in the ‘90s. The world was clueless to the devastation unfolding in North Korea at the time. It was only as tens, if not hundreds of thousands of refugees walked across the border into China that the world was able to see the full extent of damage that occurred in those years. The testimony from refugees took decades to gather. And the picture that each life painted took time to eventually tell the full story of a famine that took upwards of 3.5 million North Korean lives.