This story is from Democracy Digest:
“The clock is ticking and the bomb could explode any time,” one expert warns of North Korea’s impending crisis.
The coronavirus has isolated the North Korean economy as no sanctions could. It has devastated the regime’s ability to bring in money through legal and illegal trade, leaving it scrambling to protect the country’s diminishing foreign currency reserves, Choe Sang-Hun writes for The New York Times:
North Korea claims it has had no coronavirus cases. But it was one of the first countries to shut its border, aware that its woefully underequipped public health system made it particularly vulnerable to mass infection…..The pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for Mr. Kim, whose attempts to win sanctions relief in talks with President Trump have been fruitless. North Korea’s recent acts of hostility toward South Korea, including the destruction of the inter-Korean liaison office in the North, have been seen in part as acts of economic desperation.
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David Anderson says
Even though, like with SARS 1 they shut down early, I think they’re riddled with corona. Too many traders running back and forth from PRC before the “hammer came down” and they sealed their borders in March.
Then it grows….
And their health system is up to the best of 1950s Soviet medicine so……..
Yet another reason to not want to be North Korean.