I'm not sure how much confidence one should put in The Daily Beast, but they report that coronavirus has broken out in North Korea. To add more weight to their article, they quote Korean news reports.
Among the first to report fatalities in North Korea, the Seoul-based website Daily NK said five people had died in the critical northwestern city of Sinuiju, on the Yalu River across road and rail bridges from Dandong, which is the largest Chinese city in the region and a key point for commerce with North Korea despite sanctions.
. . . The victims had crossed the porous Yalu River border despite orders to cut off traffic from China as the disease radiated from the industrial city of Wuhan where the virus originated in December.
. . . “It simply defies credibility that a country with a grossly inadequate public health infrastructure and a malnourished population, a country that depends on China for some 90 percent of its trade, and a country that had until recently opened itself up to a major influx of Chinese tourists in order to earn foreign exchange has avoided having a lot of victims,” said [former senior U.S. diplomat Evans] Revere. “The total closure of the border and other measures Pyongyang has taken reflect a real sense of emergency in the North about the threat.”
So if this report is true, North Koreans are getting the coronavirus via trade with China. The trade is between the Korean city of Sinuiju (population of around 360,000) and the Chinese city of Dandong. Dandong is in the province of Liaoning. I am writing this post on Tuesday (2/11). Per WuFlu.Live, this province in China has only 116 cases. Hmm, is it believable that there is an outbreak of coronavirus in the city of Sinuiju based on the interactions with one of those 116 individuals in China (or once again is China not correctly identifying those who are ill)?
Here's some questions I have: What happens if this virus really breaks out in North Korea? What if this strikes Pyongyang, which has a population of around 2.9 million? Could it get out of control like what is happening in Wuhan, China? And what might the reaction of Kim Jong-un should that happen? Would he order his troops to execute the sick on sight? Might he encourage people to cross the border to South Korea to purposely spread the disease into that country? What if the virus hits the military? Would they attempt a coup against Kim Jong-un? The article specifically mentions the poor healthcare system in the country, could we see deaths in the tens of thousands if it breaks out across the country?
Like the continent of Africa, Indonesia (as of Feb 11th) had yet to record a single individual who has the virus. Reuters reports that there is a level of disbelief about this:
Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in the United States, then said in a study last week that Indonesia should rapidly strengthen outbreak surveillance and control - especially given that it had direct flights from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus.
The Harvard team said that Indonesia’s lack of confirmed cases “may suggest the potential for undetected cases” as air travel may contribute to cases being exported from China.
. . . Indonesia has readied 100 hospitals across the archipelago including three in Jakarta and has also quarantined more than 240 of its citizens evacuated from Hubei province, home to Wuhan, to the island of Natuna, north of Borneo.
So though many might wonder how Indonesia has yet to record a single case of the virus, it does appear they're taking steps such as quarantining citizens. Yet one has to wonder how countries from Thailand to the United States have individuals who traveled from Wuhan to these countries have come down with the virus and yet this hasn't occurred in Indonesia. One does have to agree with the Harvard team that there just might be undetected cases. One has to worry that an explosion of cases could suddenly pop up and over-whelm the system. And like in North Korea, what happens if the breakout occurs in a large metropolis?
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