According to the country’s state-controlled news agencies, North Korea has taken aggressive measures to contain the virus, such as shutting down its borders with China and banning entry from abroad since China confirmed the first coronavirus cases in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic.
While many countries hesitated to close down their borders and cancel flights in the early stages of the pandemic, fearing a negative impact on their economics and thus on the approval ratings of governments, North Korea was not one to think about how to handle the pandemic while causing the least public damage. Its authoritarian system could take whatever measures it wanted to prevent the spread of the virus inside of the country. Its harsh measures led the World Health Organization to report several times that not a single COVID-19 case had been confirmed in the North in 2020.
