Kim Jong Un warns of ‘great crisis’ related to pandemic in North Korea

North Korea was one of the few places to claim it has had zero cases of Covid-19.

But its leader, Kim Jong Un, now says his secretive country faces “a great crisis” related to the pandemic, blaming this on the mismanagement of his own party bureaucrats, state media reported Wednesday.

Relatively little is known about the coronavirus situation in North Korea, a totalitarian state where Kim’s regime controls the media and most other aspects of public life.

Officials in the United States and elsewhere have questioned whether North Korea has actually escaped the virus entirely. The only other non-island nation to make this Covid-free claim is the authoritarian and secretive Turkmenistan in central Asia.

Shedding some rare light on his own country, Kim criticized “senior officials in charge of important state affairs” who had “neglected” certain unspecified decisions related to the “emergency epidemic prevention campaign associated with the worldwide health crisis,” the state-controlled KCNA news agency reported Wednesday.