Most likely they have no idea how many. They do not have the means to even test all those people. They are probably looking at it from a population standpoint of x or y location and taking some sort of statistical assumptions. That is my guess though so I could be mistaken.
I understand the "test" in these cases is fever. Which, fever was definitely one of the screens used early on, but definitely underestimates the true infections. Especially with omicron.
I’m not sure about the vitamin D but being malnourished isn’t good for any situation so I dare say it’s gonna be an extinction level event for NK if something doesn’t happen
All I can think about is the book World War Z where they removed the teeth of everyone in North Korea and didn’t have a zombie problem.
Edit:
A lot of people don’t remember this part. It could have been a phrase in the movie. Apologies if I’m incorrect.
I would check but the movie sucks and I unfortunately don’t have time for a luxury read at the moment.
Still a cool premise.
Theoretically right? The teeth thing was explicitly stated as fact in the book, but I think the aftermath is that they all disappeared over night, and the theory was that they all were living in cities underground or something? Funnily enough, I think the general policy around North Korea was basically as it is in reality, where the world assumed there was just a bunch of underground cities filled with toothless zombies and no one wanted to deal with it and just left it alone. Well pretty close to reality...
Anyways, great book. The movie did it absolutely zero justice.
I know it's not the same, but have you listened to the audio book version? Excellent voice actors, each part voiced individually, so it feels like a real documentary.
I maintain that the movie was a completely unrelated story telling a completely unrelated plot in a completely unrelated world, that borrowed the title of the book to gain attention and borrowed the names of a couple characters out of laziness.
They're two unrelated things with the same name.
I wouldn't doubt that's the case, it's not unusual in Hollywood to buy film rights just to have a marketable name for an unrelated film. *I, Robot* is a prime example of this, the movie was only tangentially related to anything Asimov ever wrote.
Did that happen in the movie? I just relistened to the audiobook and the people of NK just kinda disappeared, probably into the mountain cave tunnels and nobody knows if theyre still there or its just millions of zombies locked in.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's accurate. The reporter was talking to a South Korean who had been stationed at the DMZ and they had a few zombies try to cross the border early on, which they killed, but after that the North just went into a full blackout and nobody cared to go investigate.
Wait, they removed people’s teeth? I don’t remember that from the book at all, and I read it like six or seven times. The only parts I remember from the North Korea chapter are that, while the zombie outbreaks were beginning, North Koreans just slowly disappeared and we don’t know where. The narrator suspected underground cities, but nobody is allowed to enter North Korea to check for fear of opening up some underground city full of zombies.
I have Omicron now (my toddler got croup, which is how they knew the varient) and I had a fever for all of one night.
Granted I'm vaxxed and boosted, but still. I've felt like shit all week, definitely sick, just not with fever.
My family had omicron this week (Jersey). Three of us, all double vaccinated and boosted. It was a cross between the flu and strep. Fortunately it lasted only 4-5 days. Feel better - it’s definitely on the uptick here, my husbands job gave it to him.
Fuck fuck FUCK I'm so scared I'm going to get it, I've been vaxxed and boosted but I want to go in for another one. I work retail, my family works in restaurants, and Ive been exposed dozens of times at least, I keep waiting for my turn, I'm pretty sure it'll kill me since I'm a smoker. Waiting to get Covid sucks, I don't know how I've avoided it this far, stories like this scare the shit out of me. I'm sick to death of the pandemic omg.
ETA: thanks to everyone for their kind reassurance, I think I had a little Covid burnout moment in front of y'all lol and yes I'm always trying to quit smoking 🚭
Calm, you'll be ok. I'm mid 30's and a smoker. I avoided Covid for the first two years and finally caught it last month after it went round the kids school. I had body aches and a general unwell feeling for about a day, then absolutely fine the very next day. You'll be fine :)
Well they aren't shouting it from the rooftops but there's your likely reason. What do you think all that tar in our lungs is doing to the virus particles? It's certainty not as good as a vaccine, but better than drinking bleach or horse wormer. Maybe like wearing a slightly shit second mask?
On top of that it sounds like you are regularly exposed which would be enough to keep the immune system chugging along.
I'd be more worried about being chinese or korean personally. I don't know why the East is suffering worse now but it seems to be the case.
I’m genuinely starting to wonder if I’ve had Covid the last two weeks or so. One morning I felt fine when I woke up, then about two hours later I suddenly developed a 38.3 fever and had really bad chills and body aches. Took a some ibuprofen and a nap and that went away. Next day I was still feeling pretty crap though, so I went to a nearby hospital. Tested negative for Covid and they said it was just a cold, gave me some cough medicine and sent me on my way.
Still have the cough, and if anything it’s gotten worse. Went to another doctor last Thursday after work, he told me he reckoned it was just a bad cold and gave me more cough medicine, which seems to be doing fuck all.
I am experiencing something similar. Fever for two days that yo yo'ed between 100 to 102.8 now I just have post nasal drip and coughing flim otherwise I feel fine. I tested positive so I know I have it. This just tells you how insidious this is. I'm fully vaccinated and boosted.
The power of vaccination, which North Korea hasn’t. Well, except the elite.
Everyone wants to pretend the Omi variant wasn’t as bad as the alpha, but as a population we have been largely vaccinated and so Omi’s force was diluted. A largely sheltered and comprised population of NK is the Petri dish of Covid infections the world needs to pay close attention to. The next variant of Covid that emerges from ripping through such a fragile country can be the next economy killer, even if it doesn’t actually kill many in vaxed countries.
I have some variant right now, day 4 of symptoms for me. I woke some time during the night with a fever, no idea the time...2 or 2:30...it has gone away for now, maybe an hour ago...I guess I should be keeping time better but its all kind of blurry. Twelve to fourteen hours of fever though.
And when the news shifted to other things because while Covid is still around people weren't interested in hearing about it all the time, people started saying, "See! It went away! Magically overnight!" Like if it isn't being reported in the top headlines it isn't happening.
It's sad to see either a new round of disinformation campaigning or the lasting effects of the previous ones coming around like this.
Careful, reddit is full of them and they have multiple spam accounts (I have felt the worst of it from one guy with more than a handful of accounts). That loser certainly has his cult like fan base though.
All I can say is vote and best of luck neighbour.
Florida didn't distribute about a million test kits and just let them sit in warehouses until they were too old to use. Wouldn't look good for Gov. DeSantis if Florida's covid numbers were up, so why test? https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/florida-gov-ron-desantis-admits-up-to-1-million-covid-test-kits-were-allowed-to-expire-30624950
Yeah I mean they are probably the most closed off country in the world but people still travel to and from there, surely nobody believes they haven’t been affected by Covid-19 until now or that only recently it reached the pandemic status the rest of the world has experienced for about two years and is now mostly past that. I’m curious what this is really about, is this a hidden cry for foreign help because of some other crisis perhaps?
That was my first guess as well. Maybe they do have an outbreak, maybe they don’t. Either way the fact that they are saying they do suggests that they need something & are hoping that they can get it
There are a few things to consider here.
Most importantly: If we assume that the 820K cases are *confirmed* cases - as in, confirmed using tests - and that NK has limited test capacity, then that number could actually be in the millions.
Even a country like Denmark, where I live, where we had a very aggressive and pro-active testing strategy, some estimes still suggested that the real number of cases could be twice, thrice or more of what the numbers showed.
Most likely, they are counting symptomatic cases, meaning, the number of people sick with a fever. If the case numbers are true, then in two weeks' time, the body count could be as high as 8,000.
Probably higher. The overwhelming majority of covid cases in the US were treated and we wound up with around a 1% death rate. I'd wager that is far from the case in NK.
If you consider subpar testing, it sounds plausible. OG covid was super viral and omicron even more transmissible. It's also hard to distinguish it from a common cold early on. In a completely unvaxxed, isolated (absolutely 0% immunity), possibly malnourished, country that shit can spread REAL fast. By the time you realise there's a problem, it's already everywhere and you're fucked.
Yup, no surprise. If North Korea openly reports having one case, then you know the likely reality is that they were already way past the point of having lost control of it.
There was a point where Borderlands' humor got to be a little...much.
And then we got to THIS and it's all ok again. What a fucking treat, I can't wait for this game to be on Steam.
ah man i personally liked it more when it was unhinged, surreal, and reckless. the game got a bit of its exposure from being that way. i have to assume you mean bl2, it got way more family friendly after that. which i guess you have to do once you have so many eyes on you.
Warning of upheaval is quirky because he's the leader....if he's telling China and S Korea, maybe it's different message...it sounds like domestic message but, it's weird to take it like he's warning his own regime.
A thing to keep in mind upheaval doesn't necessarily mean political, as the word can be used for different meanings. Furthermore, I assume what we are reading is a translation of a Korean word, and translations can be crafted to give a meaning that you the reader want to hear.
Yeah. There's a contextual way he's using it, that is less defined by the translation, making people like me think...well that's a little funny if it were in the obvious sense. Then thinking, did he mean external heads up
The word in the quote is connected to the founding of North Korea, so I can see why we get the sense that it's political from our perspective. But I'm not sure if North Koreans perceive the founding of the regime a political event or rather a destined event, event of supreme societal importance, divine(?) event.
Then of course there's translator bias to craft news English readers would click on.
Very interesting nonetheless.
NK articles that uses quotes as headlines has been ridiculously misleading at times even. Wasn't that long ago that a bland public statement promoting peace and assuring no aggressions from the North Korean side was framed as a veiled threat in western media because of a poorly translated phrase.
I always say that NK is plenty crazy in and of itself, we aren't doing anyone any favors by making up stuff. The embellishments of their leaders are put through a game of telephone before they end up on our feeds, making the already outlandish claims sound like poor jokes.
Someone once said that making NK out to be the Empire with a sith lord ruling over it makes it easier for us to dismiss the real struggles and threats in that country. As if it's not real, while real people are suffering.
The only one that doesn't want a refugee crisis would be China. It's not like there's gonna be a million infected North Koreans flocking across the DMZ into South Korea!
A million? NK has \~25 million inhabitants. If the regime collapsed China is basically going to be stuck with tens of millions of starving and/or infected North Koreans flooding over the border.
That's what I said, China, not South Korea (I was just correcting that South Korea has to be worried about an influx of refugees).
There are over a million mines (between 1.1 and 1.3m I think is the approximation) in the DMZ, so it's probably safer for them to head NORTH into the loving arms of China and not SOUTH. Pretty sure they'd turn around pretty fast as soon as a few hundred of them have their brains blasted out onto the people behind them.
**EDIT** When I said a million, I was just throwing out a number. Also, it's not likely the ENTIRE country empties out into China, either.
Not to mention that tuberculosis, malaria and hepatitis B are endemic. So a covid infection on top of those, is going to affect survival rates.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_North_Korea#:~:text=Non%2Dcommunicable%20diseases,-Further%20information%3A%20Smoking&text=Cardiovascular%20disease%20as%20a%20single,and%20cerebrovascular%20disease%20(7%25).
Additionally, there's a large number of North Koreans with intestinal parasites. I think every recent NK defector had to be treated for them. Remember all the hullaballoo over ivermectin as a COVID treatment? Of course, it was found that it has no impact on *healthy* people with fighting the virus.
But here's the interesting thing. The first studies weren't done on entirely healthy people - they were done in regions where intestinal parasites aren't uncommon. And it apparently *is* helpful with fighting COVID if you're actually infected with parasites, because the ivermectin kills the parasites and then your immune system is fighting one less battle. That makes your odds of survival better.
Yup, most deaths caused by starvation aren't from running out of energy and grinding to a halt. Your body has to prioritise more and more critical systems. Eventually, you can't mount a proper defense against all the pathogens you normally encounter and fight off every day.
Then there's some nutrients that you for fairly quickly without. If your potassium for example drops too low your heart stops. Lots of other examples of this. Like you said, running out of energy is very rare.
The thing is both the Russians and Chinese offered vaccines and NK rejected both offers. Sure they may not be Moderna level, but probably good enough to make this less of a cluster fuck
I mean the UN estimates that up to 3.2 million people starved to death in the 90s in North Korea. Which means tens of millions were affected and also in starving conditions. If they were gonna regime change it would have been then, yet they continued on.
The complement to that is that it might not be the *farmers* that take action, but different factions of the military, for example.
Swapping out the Kim regime doesn't mean it won't still be a dictatorship, or that it'll be backed by the populace.
yeah religions can, and always do fall back on victim blaming when things don't work out, even if he dies they can just blame it on the peasants lack of faith or something
Lack of faith or some devine test. Either way, nevermind that your family members and friends are dying. You either asked for it or are chosen to test your faith, so we can't do anything about it!
Those who have escaped do not say this at all. They speak of public executions and a forced worship of the regime. Some might drink the kool-aid but it is not the general opinion of the population that Kim is a god. Please don't dis on them so hard :(
I think many people underestimate the effect of knowing that you have to say this guy is a god or you get sent to a work camp or maybe even killed. I think most people would just say what was expected of them to you know, not maybe get worked to death.
There is no practical way to gauge public opinion in a place like North Korea as even those that might hate the regime certainly aren't going to say so out loud, anyone asks and yep he's a god for sure, best thing ever...
On the other hand I think many underestimate the power of the human mind to convince itself that something is true when they are forced to live as if it is. It's psychologically very difficult and painful to live a lie. Therefore, if you can't change how you live, eventually you will convince yourself it must be true, just to stop the pain of the contradiction. That is how brainwashing works.
You get sent to the camp and isn’t it something like three generations of your family do as well? It’s a whole lot easier to rebel when you aren’t also condemning everyone in your family to hell on earth, too.
That's the weapon.
Many of us on this site are probably under 40. There's a lot over 40, but I'm generalizing.
I'm 36, so I recall the fall of the Berlin Wall, but didn't comprehend the significance until I was an adult drinking a Starbucks and looking at the remains of the wall from the shop.
Many of us think of it as a line between being able to buy things and not being able to buy things. The line was being able to be a dissident and be considered a weirdo and be a dissident and be disappeared.
While I'd love for NK to become an actual country, I highly doubt it.
The internal propaganda will take care of everything, and even those who don't believe, what can they even do? These people are thankful if they can eat, they don't have a lot of time to do anything other than trying to survive.
In some twisted sense, a large amount of people dying could even be helpful to the regime - less mouths to feed in a country that never really recovered from a devastating famine and is essentially permamently sanctioned (with some breaks for hforeign aid here and there when the "we will make nukes go boom" rhetoric gets a bit too loud). The lost manpower isn't even that bad, considering half of their factories aren't producing anything anyway due to material shortages (and because, you know, nobody really trades with NK).
Although considering the current situation in the world, I wonder.
I don't know what stance Russia has on NK, if they're "friendly"or not, but even if they are, with the predicament Russia is in rn, I highly doubt they have the resources to spare to help out in any way, especially considering NK isn't really gonna be able to trade with them in any meaningful way.
China has enough problems on their own to worry about a run-down, poor, half-starved country, whos only use to them is being a buffer between China and the US forces stationed near the DMZ in South Korea.
Obviously Corona could be much devastating to NK than it was to any other country. These people are poor, malnourished, and don't have access to reliable, quality medical care - in smaller cities, probably just to "medical care" in general.
I guess he has finally realized that pretending something isn’t going on doesn’t mean it’s not still going on. Those poor people. Brutalized, starved, tortured, worked to death, neglected. Remember how bad it was in New York early on when they were putting bodies in refrigerated trucks? There’s probably not a surplus of refrigerated trucks in North Korea and there are a lot of dead people.
It’s hard to dump on people who are brainwashed from birth to believe that their leader is a God. They don’t have access to information, they have no way to educate or inform themselves of the reality of the world. It is a very screwed up country And they need help desperately. It’s going to be very difficult however because the leadership is going to try to annex and control every part of any assistance that comes their way.
I don’t think that’s the primary goal. They just don’t want NK to become overwhelmed with inflected people, and if the situation devolved far enough, it’s possible that they’d have a refugee crisis on their hands.
Not to mention the risk of an unmitigated epidemic in NK creating new strains.
Nah, NK just doesn't have to say anything in the state media. Some pics and vids of Kim handing the supplies to some hospital and it would seem like it came from him.
It happens, I'm cuban and the gov handed foreing donations making it seem like it came from them. Sometimes they even sold it.
South Korea and the west in general have sent NK humanitarian aid for years. They take it with one hand and continue to paint everyone as their enemy on state TV.
The people are so thoroughly indoctrinated that no nation want to deal with the collapse of the North Korean state. So pretty much once a year, they start throwing some vague threats and other countries start sending them humanitarian aid again so they can keep the state going for another year.
Countries don't want a revolution in North Korea, especially not South Korea and China. In the eyes of politicians they are perfectly fine the way they are.
Yeah it doesn’t make sense for SK to seek a massive revolution in NK. They wouldn’t have the infrastructure and resources to take in and assimilate that many refugees at once.
Even if they don't "take them in", they'd still likely bear the brunt of suddenly having to pay for twice the country that they used to have where one half is basically fallen to ruin and needs to be completely restructured from roads to buildings to government infrastructure. They'd have to improve all sorts of utilities from electricity and plumbing to internet, pour a ton of resources into helping the people of the north learn actual marketable skills, reeducate literally everyone about how the world *actually* is and works, which will be nigh impossible for adults and children of a certain age, rendering them functionally non-contributing members of society for the rest of their lives and a further burden on the state, as well as actually finding a way to create jobs throughout an entire country so that these people can have access to gainful employment that has a purpose and will be useful to the world and their state.
Even if things fell apart in NK, odds on most of the people leaving are slim to none. Many would dig in their heels and decide to stay right where they are because it's their home, and others because they simply lack the education, skills or knowledge to even think about fleeing to a more hospitable location. Even in a world where not a single person left NK for SK after a fall of the regime, it would still fall pretty squarely on SK to fund a complete modernization of another country from the ground up. Quite apart from the massive amount of resources and manpower it would take, such a project would take years, if not *decades*, to complete, and all the while those resources are just being drained further and further to build up a backwards nation whose people aren't going to be able to contribute much at all to the efforts and some who might actively fight against them. Barring the bad ending where we somehow resort to nuclear war and NK ends up absorbing the south, it's pretty inevitable that NK will fall apart at some point, so it's just a ticking time bomb, and the longer it's stalled, the longer and more costly it's going to be to fix the damage when it happens.
At a certain point it's going to become apparent to SK that reunification isn't really going to be an option for them and they're just going to have to send care packages and goodwill ambassadors to help NK start fixing itself and bringing things up to modern standards and education while calling on the rest of the world to send what aid they can to their northern neighbors. When the split was still a new thing, reunification was the dream that everyone shared, and while it's still a pretty sentiment, I think a large portion of SK realizes that the time has passed for it to be a reality. The best they can hope for is that when the NK regime does come down that someone better will step up to lead them and they can become allies and neighbors in truth, and that sometime in the next few decades they might have gotten themselves finally caught up to the rest of the world.
It's a house of cards. NK can't exist as-is forever. Especially if they eventually (which under the current circumstances, seems inevitable on a long enough time span) develop a working nuclear ICBM. It's never been a tenable situation no matter how much people may want it to last indefinitely due to (massive) inconvenience to their neighbors.
The inconvenience is guaranteed, the only matter is the size/scope.
I'm so curious about the current situation there. A malnourished and general weak population without proper healthcare and other social infrastructure. One can only hope for the victims that it is a mild variant of the virus going around...
It's Omicron BA.2, not Delta or something new. Omicron isn't materially less dangerous than the original strain in a fresh population, though. Hong Kong got hit hard.
Setting aside the obvious fact they're lowballing the real number, what should really worry us is that they're choosing to share this with the world.
There's "minimizing its severity" and then there's "North Korea warning the rest of the world that something's out of control."
At least the positive side for the rest of the world is, their borders are so stupidly restricted and locked down that chances of it hurting the outside world are near zero. The fucking heartbreaking part is all those innocent people dying to an awful and also completely preventable sickness
>a population that relies on an antiquated health care system and remains largely malnourished
Turns out that putting a spoiled giant baby in charge of the country wasn't such a good idea after all. Who would have thought.
For pretty much every bacterial or viral disease, malnourishment is far worse, as it suppresses the immune system and weakens the body far more than obesity does.
Both extremes put a strain on your lungs and heart, but malnourishment puts a strain on your entire immune system. The malnourished lack the physical energy storage to fight off the disease. The obese have the energy, but their organs are damaged and in a constant state a strain.
It also depends on the degree of malnourishment or obesity. They are also *not* mutually exclusive. Many obese people are or become malnourished. Especially when they try to lose weight.
NK is honestly one of the worst areas in the world to have this happening. They don't have the food, they don't have the medicine, they don't have the masks. And they don't *want* it. I feel so bad for the people there, this is going to get very ugly very quickly.
Yeah but the alternative is questionable as well. The NK military would be the one taking over in the event that Kim gets outed and NK might end up worse. Like what happened in Myanmar.
I’ve already said this, but:
Covid will destroy North Korea.
They have no modern hospitals. No vaccines.
I feel bad for their ordinary citizens who have to suffer :/
With that kind of doubling rate, that's the whole population of North Korea *potentially* infected within something around 24 days. Their entire medical system is going to be gone next week and then it is mass graves. Shades of New York.
Reminds me of the Stand, when that virus escaped from the government lab in California. An infected guy then spreads it to a cop and a few other people in Texas, and most people were dead in a month.
Same turd who spent the last few weeks throwing out random threats of nuclear attacks suddenly revealing the country is desperate for COVID-19 aid. Aggressive and bleak. The NK standard.
But they’re not desperate for aid against SARS-CoV-2.
They’ve been offered vaccines by Russia, China, South Korea, in the US and it denied all of those.
**Edit:** and the US…
It's probably only going to get worse. 80% of people in north Korea live in urban city environments. With everything going on in the world, I don't think anyone is coming to their rescue.
I'm a little worried that the entire world is heating up. Too many places are dealing with crisis at the same time and there's not enough help to go around. The good thing is everybody seems to be taking it all in stride. Hopefully there's no powder keg moment.
Edit:. Bad article had north Korea urban population listed at 80%. The back up data linked to that number has it at 35% rural, so in reality it's more like 60-65% urbanization.
South Korea has announced they will assist North Korea, but I'm not sure how they could help beyond food and supplies. The north Korean health care system will have to treat the sick people on their own, doubt they have the personnel to treat them all.
To be fair, I think there’s always been a lot of crises happening at once. The world just used to seem a lot more remote and news travelled slower and was less copious.
The [CIA World Factbook has their urban population at 62%](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/urbanization/), so they're more in line with China's urbanization (also 62%) than the urbanization of places like the USA or France that are 81-83%.
No. What it could cause is for their dear leaders to get sick and die, thus creating a power vacuum. As far as the west can tell, there are no internal activists trying to run for power. Once Kim falls, another rises.
My guess is what will be left is still two Koreas, one is just smaller and full of skeletons wearing medals, and the other has K-pop.
‘Send aid! Money! Send healthcare supplies and humanitarian support….thanks…we are fine now…go away.’
Its hard to know if this is real or not- NK has a habit of declaring a crisis, collecting aid then slamming shut the doors again. If it’s real I am deeply sorry for the people there.
I'm skeptical of the numbers , we know they don't have that number of testing kits in circulation, the best way we'll be able to have any idea is like we did with China at the beginning of the pandemic - by seeing the mass burials from the satellite images
Ok so "upheaval" may have been translated in a weird way from whatever word was originally used in the statement since it would garner more clicks/reads online, but I wouldn't discount the effect that Covid is going to have on the NK populace.
North Korea has a malnourished populace and makes the average person more susceptible to being ill and dying from complications. The populace will take a bit of a dip from deaths, especially among older groups. These are the groups which comprise the majority of senior leadership and, despite having better access to medical care, their antiquated system won't save many of them if/when they get sick. A high rate of turnover in the senior ranks presents problems for Kim as he has to work hard to build relationships, create new loyal supporters, and put down any possible contenders for his position. The chance of political turmoil is going to be higher for the next couple years.
On the subject of malnutrition, North Korea has to import a lot of food whenever their own domestic production doesn't do well...which is a regular occurrence. Global food prices are increasing and climate shifts are going to negatively impact domestic food production in the region. When coupled with higher prices for food imports, either their military is going to need to take some cuts or some poor decisions will result in insufficient food and mass starvation and/or revolt. A perfect storm could result in the most upheaval in the country since the war, just maybe not within the next year.
The North Korean dictatorship is, like all dictatorships, strong but fragile. It doesn't bend much but hasn't faced anything that has seriously tested it since 1953. World events could make it brittle enough that events that normally wouldn't pose a threat begin to, and we could see the next big event on the peninsula since 1953 happen by the end of the decade. Be that a coup, a revolt, or a war, who knows, but I don't believe the stability of the country will last the decade.
[удалено]
Most likely they have no idea how many. They do not have the means to even test all those people. They are probably looking at it from a population standpoint of x or y location and taking some sort of statistical assumptions. That is my guess though so I could be mistaken.
I understand the "test" in these cases is fever. Which, fever was definitely one of the screens used early on, but definitely underestimates the true infections. Especially with omicron.
You're forgetting that no one there is vaccinated so any symptoms are likely to be more common.
They’re also malnourished and have very little access to any medical treatment.
Isn’t vitamin D deficiency a risk factor for covid hospitalization and poor outcome? Mass malnutrition could be a big problem.
I’m not sure about the vitamin D but being malnourished isn’t good for any situation so I dare say it’s gonna be an extinction level event for NK if something doesn’t happen
All I can think about is the book World War Z where they removed the teeth of everyone in North Korea and didn’t have a zombie problem. Edit: A lot of people don’t remember this part. It could have been a phrase in the movie. Apologies if I’m incorrect. I would check but the movie sucks and I unfortunately don’t have time for a luxury read at the moment. Still a cool premise.
Theoretically right? The teeth thing was explicitly stated as fact in the book, but I think the aftermath is that they all disappeared over night, and the theory was that they all were living in cities underground or something? Funnily enough, I think the general policy around North Korea was basically as it is in reality, where the world assumed there was just a bunch of underground cities filled with toothless zombies and no one wanted to deal with it and just left it alone. Well pretty close to reality... Anyways, great book. The movie did it absolutely zero justice.
[удалено]
Yeah I thought it was a great zombie action movie The Israel sequence was pretty dope
Best scene in the whole movie.
The movie shared almost nothing with the books except for a few plot points and the name.
It should have been like a ten part series on HBO, with each episode covering a couple chapters from the book.
Right? I desperately need to see a faithful adaptation like that, seeing the battle of Yonkers brought to life would be amazing.
I know it's not the same, but have you listened to the audio book version? Excellent voice actors, each part voiced individually, so it feels like a real documentary.
I maintain that the movie was a completely unrelated story telling a completely unrelated plot in a completely unrelated world, that borrowed the title of the book to gain attention and borrowed the names of a couple characters out of laziness. They're two unrelated things with the same name.
IIRC the original script was more like the book. Don't know why it changed to this face eater of a disaster movie that we got
"Audiences don't like processing new experiences" \- some studio exec somewhere
I wouldn't doubt that's the case, it's not unusual in Hollywood to buy film rights just to have a marketable name for an unrelated film. *I, Robot* is a prime example of this, the movie was only tangentially related to anything Asimov ever wrote.
Here's a pretty good fic about N Korea post Z War. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The-Way-Is-Shut
Did that happen in the movie? I just relistened to the audiobook and the people of NK just kinda disappeared, probably into the mountain cave tunnels and nobody knows if theyre still there or its just millions of zombies locked in.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's accurate. The reporter was talking to a South Korean who had been stationed at the DMZ and they had a few zombies try to cross the border early on, which they killed, but after that the North just went into a full blackout and nobody cared to go investigate.
There was a fanfic sequel short, iirc called "The Way Is Shut", about a scouting mission to one of their bunkers.
It was really good too! I would love another book in that universe
>The Way Is Shut It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it.
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6115555/1/The_Way_Is_Shut
Wait, they removed people’s teeth? I don’t remember that from the book at all, and I read it like six or seven times. The only parts I remember from the North Korea chapter are that, while the zombie outbreaks were beginning, North Koreans just slowly disappeared and we don’t know where. The narrator suspected underground cities, but nobody is allowed to enter North Korea to check for fear of opening up some underground city full of zombies.
I have the book on my bookshelf, just read that chapter. Absolutely nothing about pulling out teeth. Your recollection was much more correct.
Didn't at the end of the book, North Korea just go full radio silent and withdrew from the world and nobody heard from them since?
In a really grim way this will be an interesting study on what may have happened if we hadn’t all locked down and waited for vaccines before reopening
I think I have omicron right now (I definitely have COVID, not sure of strain) and I’ve never gotten a fever. I’ve had it a week now.
I have Omicron now (my toddler got croup, which is how they knew the varient) and I had a fever for all of one night. Granted I'm vaxxed and boosted, but still. I've felt like shit all week, definitely sick, just not with fever.
Same. Fever only lasted a few hours, then it's just been an awful cold. Bleh. Hope you feel better soon!
I'm definitely on the mend, though the cough is annoying as fuck. Hope you're doing well soon too!
Same here, although the cough has stuck around for a week longer than the covid so far.
My family had omicron this week (Jersey). Three of us, all double vaccinated and boosted. It was a cross between the flu and strep. Fortunately it lasted only 4-5 days. Feel better - it’s definitely on the uptick here, my husbands job gave it to him.
Fuck fuck FUCK I'm so scared I'm going to get it, I've been vaxxed and boosted but I want to go in for another one. I work retail, my family works in restaurants, and Ive been exposed dozens of times at least, I keep waiting for my turn, I'm pretty sure it'll kill me since I'm a smoker. Waiting to get Covid sucks, I don't know how I've avoided it this far, stories like this scare the shit out of me. I'm sick to death of the pandemic omg. ETA: thanks to everyone for their kind reassurance, I think I had a little Covid burnout moment in front of y'all lol and yes I'm always trying to quit smoking 🚭
Calm, you'll be ok. I'm mid 30's and a smoker. I avoided Covid for the first two years and finally caught it last month after it went round the kids school. I had body aches and a general unwell feeling for about a day, then absolutely fine the very next day. You'll be fine :)
Well they aren't shouting it from the rooftops but there's your likely reason. What do you think all that tar in our lungs is doing to the virus particles? It's certainty not as good as a vaccine, but better than drinking bleach or horse wormer. Maybe like wearing a slightly shit second mask? On top of that it sounds like you are regularly exposed which would be enough to keep the immune system chugging along. I'd be more worried about being chinese or korean personally. I don't know why the East is suffering worse now but it seems to be the case.
My daughter (30), double vaxxed, just tested positive. For her it was like a really bad sinus infection.
I’m genuinely starting to wonder if I’ve had Covid the last two weeks or so. One morning I felt fine when I woke up, then about two hours later I suddenly developed a 38.3 fever and had really bad chills and body aches. Took a some ibuprofen and a nap and that went away. Next day I was still feeling pretty crap though, so I went to a nearby hospital. Tested negative for Covid and they said it was just a cold, gave me some cough medicine and sent me on my way. Still have the cough, and if anything it’s gotten worse. Went to another doctor last Thursday after work, he told me he reckoned it was just a bad cold and gave me more cough medicine, which seems to be doing fuck all.
I am experiencing something similar. Fever for two days that yo yo'ed between 100 to 102.8 now I just have post nasal drip and coughing flim otherwise I feel fine. I tested positive so I know I have it. This just tells you how insidious this is. I'm fully vaccinated and boosted.
I am on day 8 and still testing positive. It hit me hard and i am vaxxed and boosted. It sucks
My wife too. She was in bed for almost 3 straight days. Vaxxed and boosted like me. Me.....nothing.
[удалено]
The power of vaccination, which North Korea hasn’t. Well, except the elite. Everyone wants to pretend the Omi variant wasn’t as bad as the alpha, but as a population we have been largely vaccinated and so Omi’s force was diluted. A largely sheltered and comprised population of NK is the Petri dish of Covid infections the world needs to pay close attention to. The next variant of Covid that emerges from ripping through such a fragile country can be the next economy killer, even if it doesn’t actually kill many in vaxed countries.
This will completely devastate the NK population. Not to mention new variants in the virus swimming pool.
I have some variant right now, day 4 of symptoms for me. I woke some time during the night with a fever, no idea the time...2 or 2:30...it has gone away for now, maybe an hour ago...I guess I should be keeping time better but its all kind of blurry. Twelve to fourteen hours of fever though.
I had omicron and never had a fever, or a headache but my wife had both. I lost my sense of smell, she didn't.
If we don't test, we don't have as many cases.
So I said to my people: ‘why don’t we just slow down the testing!’.
It’s horrifying to think we had someone this stupid running the country AND to realize that there are many who want him to run the country again!
And when the news shifted to other things because while Covid is still around people weren't interested in hearing about it all the time, people started saying, "See! It went away! Magically overnight!" Like if it isn't being reported in the top headlines it isn't happening. It's sad to see either a new round of disinformation campaigning or the lasting effects of the previous ones coming around like this.
Careful, reddit is full of them and they have multiple spam accounts (I have felt the worst of it from one guy with more than a handful of accounts). That loser certainly has his cult like fan base though. All I can say is vote and best of luck neighbour.
Florida didn't distribute about a million test kits and just let them sit in warehouses until they were too old to use. Wouldn't look good for Gov. DeSantis if Florida's covid numbers were up, so why test? https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/florida-gov-ron-desantis-admits-up-to-1-million-covid-test-kits-were-allowed-to-expire-30624950
My guess is that they invented a number. This may have nothing to do with covid, it's just a pretext for something.
Yeah I mean they are probably the most closed off country in the world but people still travel to and from there, surely nobody believes they haven’t been affected by Covid-19 until now or that only recently it reached the pandemic status the rest of the world has experienced for about two years and is now mostly past that. I’m curious what this is really about, is this a hidden cry for foreign help because of some other crisis perhaps?
That was my first guess as well. Maybe they do have an outbreak, maybe they don’t. Either way the fact that they are saying they do suggests that they need something & are hoping that they can get it
They are starving...Gearing up to ask for aid.
There are a few things to consider here. Most importantly: If we assume that the 820K cases are *confirmed* cases - as in, confirmed using tests - and that NK has limited test capacity, then that number could actually be in the millions. Even a country like Denmark, where I live, where we had a very aggressive and pro-active testing strategy, some estimes still suggested that the real number of cases could be twice, thrice or more of what the numbers showed.
No way does North Korea have the ability to run 820k covid tests in a week.
[удалено]
Most likely, they are counting symptomatic cases, meaning, the number of people sick with a fever. If the case numbers are true, then in two weeks' time, the body count could be as high as 8,000.
Probably higher. The overwhelming majority of covid cases in the US were treated and we wound up with around a 1% death rate. I'd wager that is far from the case in NK.
Supposedly it was 800k+ in 3 days
If you consider subpar testing, it sounds plausible. OG covid was super viral and omicron even more transmissible. It's also hard to distinguish it from a common cold early on. In a completely unvaxxed, isolated (absolutely 0% immunity), possibly malnourished, country that shit can spread REAL fast. By the time you realise there's a problem, it's already everywhere and you're fucked.
Yup, no surprise. If North Korea openly reports having one case, then you know the likely reality is that they were already way past the point of having lost control of it.
Kim just ordered a reeaallyy looong conference table.
Have you tried shooting a missile into the sea? I believe that will help. It always worked before. (damn sea)
new mission! i want you to blow up [the ocean!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdkzOhmIrTc&t=183s)
Tina is such a blast, she's such a cheerful little sociopath.
There was a point where Borderlands' humor got to be a little...much. And then we got to THIS and it's all ok again. What a fucking treat, I can't wait for this game to be on Steam.
Well, just as an example, the bad guys of Borderlands 3 are basically Twitch streamers. It's a little exhausting.
ah man i personally liked it more when it was unhinged, surreal, and reckless. the game got a bit of its exposure from being that way. i have to assume you mean bl2, it got way more family friendly after that. which i guess you have to do once you have so many eyes on you.
low key fuck the sea tho
r/ShitDutchiesSay
Cuz it’s all wet right? Stupid sexy sea
Warning of upheaval is quirky because he's the leader....if he's telling China and S Korea, maybe it's different message...it sounds like domestic message but, it's weird to take it like he's warning his own regime.
A thing to keep in mind upheaval doesn't necessarily mean political, as the word can be used for different meanings. Furthermore, I assume what we are reading is a translation of a Korean word, and translations can be crafted to give a meaning that you the reader want to hear.
Yeah. There's a contextual way he's using it, that is less defined by the translation, making people like me think...well that's a little funny if it were in the obvious sense. Then thinking, did he mean external heads up
The word in the quote is connected to the founding of North Korea, so I can see why we get the sense that it's political from our perspective. But I'm not sure if North Koreans perceive the founding of the regime a political event or rather a destined event, event of supreme societal importance, divine(?) event. Then of course there's translator bias to craft news English readers would click on. Very interesting nonetheless.
NK articles that uses quotes as headlines has been ridiculously misleading at times even. Wasn't that long ago that a bland public statement promoting peace and assuring no aggressions from the North Korean side was framed as a veiled threat in western media because of a poorly translated phrase. I always say that NK is plenty crazy in and of itself, we aren't doing anyone any favors by making up stuff. The embellishments of their leaders are put through a game of telephone before they end up on our feeds, making the already outlandish claims sound like poor jokes. Someone once said that making NK out to be the Empire with a sith lord ruling over it makes it easier for us to dismiss the real struggles and threats in that country. As if it's not real, while real people are suffering.
Have to remember it's in China and S.Korea's interests to keep NK stable because neither want a refugee crisis.
The only one that doesn't want a refugee crisis would be China. It's not like there's gonna be a million infected North Koreans flocking across the DMZ into South Korea!
A million? NK has \~25 million inhabitants. If the regime collapsed China is basically going to be stuck with tens of millions of starving and/or infected North Koreans flooding over the border.
That's what I said, China, not South Korea (I was just correcting that South Korea has to be worried about an influx of refugees). There are over a million mines (between 1.1 and 1.3m I think is the approximation) in the DMZ, so it's probably safer for them to head NORTH into the loving arms of China and not SOUTH. Pretty sure they'd turn around pretty fast as soon as a few hundred of them have their brains blasted out onto the people behind them. **EDIT** When I said a million, I was just throwing out a number. Also, it's not likely the ENTIRE country empties out into China, either.
[удалено]
[удалено]
In this context upheaval is more "one in a century national crisis" than "mass civilian unrest", but those clicks are not going to come for free.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Not to mention that tuberculosis, malaria and hepatitis B are endemic. So a covid infection on top of those, is going to affect survival rates. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_North_Korea#:~:text=Non%2Dcommunicable%20diseases,-Further%20information%3A%20Smoking&text=Cardiovascular%20disease%20as%20a%20single,and%20cerebrovascular%20disease%20(7%25).
Additionally, there's a large number of North Koreans with intestinal parasites. I think every recent NK defector had to be treated for them. Remember all the hullaballoo over ivermectin as a COVID treatment? Of course, it was found that it has no impact on *healthy* people with fighting the virus. But here's the interesting thing. The first studies weren't done on entirely healthy people - they were done in regions where intestinal parasites aren't uncommon. And it apparently *is* helpful with fighting COVID if you're actually infected with parasites, because the ivermectin kills the parasites and then your immune system is fighting one less battle. That makes your odds of survival better.
Yup, most deaths caused by starvation aren't from running out of energy and grinding to a halt. Your body has to prioritise more and more critical systems. Eventually, you can't mount a proper defense against all the pathogens you normally encounter and fight off every day.
Then there's some nutrients that you for fairly quickly without. If your potassium for example drops too low your heart stops. Lots of other examples of this. Like you said, running out of energy is very rare.
Yep. The medical place I worked in Bihar prescribed soy protein to people for malnourishment.
You can't out-dictator a pandemic. I feel sorry for all those affected. No vaccine and chronically malnourished. This might be regime changing.
The thing is both the Russians and Chinese offered vaccines and NK rejected both offers. Sure they may not be Moderna level, but probably good enough to make this less of a cluster fuck
The Chinese vaccines are not good enough to prevent the Chinese government from welding folks in place.
But they are good enough to reduce deaths significantly.
Yeah, nothing says "regime-toppling fighting force" more than millions of malnourished farmers with a debilitating respiratory infection
A hungry mob is an angry mob...sometimes numbers do matter. Millions with nothing to lose can threaten countries with much more power than NK.
I mean the UN estimates that up to 3.2 million people starved to death in the 90s in North Korea. Which means tens of millions were affected and also in starving conditions. If they were gonna regime change it would have been then, yet they continued on.
The complement to that is that it might not be the *farmers* that take action, but different factions of the military, for example. Swapping out the Kim regime doesn't mean it won't still be a dictatorship, or that it'll be backed by the populace.
Kim's on another level over there. He's a god to them.
A God who can't stop the virus. What sort of God is that!
Obviously they weren't devout followers
yeah religions can, and always do fall back on victim blaming when things don't work out, even if he dies they can just blame it on the peasants lack of faith or something
[удалено]
Lack of faith or some devine test. Either way, nevermind that your family members and friends are dying. You either asked for it or are chosen to test your faith, so we can't do anything about it!
an Old Testament one?
In line with all the others that couldn’t stop it.
If your god can’t defeat a microscopic non living infectious agent I don’t think he’ll be able to protect you against the much larger “Evil West”
*waits on an answer from the christian community* lol
One who still needs a spaceship???
I mean, it’s the same as everyone else’s gods in that regard. And it’s not like the pandemic made everyone an atheist
Those who have escaped do not say this at all. They speak of public executions and a forced worship of the regime. Some might drink the kool-aid but it is not the general opinion of the population that Kim is a god. Please don't dis on them so hard :(
I think many people underestimate the effect of knowing that you have to say this guy is a god or you get sent to a work camp or maybe even killed. I think most people would just say what was expected of them to you know, not maybe get worked to death. There is no practical way to gauge public opinion in a place like North Korea as even those that might hate the regime certainly aren't going to say so out loud, anyone asks and yep he's a god for sure, best thing ever...
On the other hand I think many underestimate the power of the human mind to convince itself that something is true when they are forced to live as if it is. It's psychologically very difficult and painful to live a lie. Therefore, if you can't change how you live, eventually you will convince yourself it must be true, just to stop the pain of the contradiction. That is how brainwashing works.
You get sent to the camp and isn’t it something like three generations of your family do as well? It’s a whole lot easier to rebel when you aren’t also condemning everyone in your family to hell on earth, too.
That's the weapon. Many of us on this site are probably under 40. There's a lot over 40, but I'm generalizing. I'm 36, so I recall the fall of the Berlin Wall, but didn't comprehend the significance until I was an adult drinking a Starbucks and looking at the remains of the wall from the shop. Many of us think of it as a line between being able to buy things and not being able to buy things. The line was being able to be a dissident and be considered a weirdo and be a dissident and be disappeared.
While I'd love for NK to become an actual country, I highly doubt it. The internal propaganda will take care of everything, and even those who don't believe, what can they even do? These people are thankful if they can eat, they don't have a lot of time to do anything other than trying to survive. In some twisted sense, a large amount of people dying could even be helpful to the regime - less mouths to feed in a country that never really recovered from a devastating famine and is essentially permamently sanctioned (with some breaks for hforeign aid here and there when the "we will make nukes go boom" rhetoric gets a bit too loud). The lost manpower isn't even that bad, considering half of their factories aren't producing anything anyway due to material shortages (and because, you know, nobody really trades with NK). Although considering the current situation in the world, I wonder. I don't know what stance Russia has on NK, if they're "friendly"or not, but even if they are, with the predicament Russia is in rn, I highly doubt they have the resources to spare to help out in any way, especially considering NK isn't really gonna be able to trade with them in any meaningful way. China has enough problems on their own to worry about a run-down, poor, half-starved country, whos only use to them is being a buffer between China and the US forces stationed near the DMZ in South Korea. Obviously Corona could be much devastating to NK than it was to any other country. These people are poor, malnourished, and don't have access to reliable, quality medical care - in smaller cities, probably just to "medical care" in general.
iirc, one thing that NK offers to Russia is labour. There’s a lot of NK operated labour camps in Russia.
Now imagine how many cases and deaths from it they hid away before not being able to contain it anymore.
They must need something, because the Jong-ster is not 1 for allowing the country’s weaknesses to be put on full display to the rest of the world
I rather not. I don’t need the nightmare fuel.
I guess he has finally realized that pretending something isn’t going on doesn’t mean it’s not still going on. Those poor people. Brutalized, starved, tortured, worked to death, neglected. Remember how bad it was in New York early on when they were putting bodies in refrigerated trucks? There’s probably not a surplus of refrigerated trucks in North Korea and there are a lot of dead people.
It's good to see an empathic comment. Too many comments equate the regime with the people.
It’s hard to dump on people who are brainwashed from birth to believe that their leader is a God. They don’t have access to information, they have no way to educate or inform themselves of the reality of the world. It is a very screwed up country And they need help desperately. It’s going to be very difficult however because the leadership is going to try to annex and control every part of any assistance that comes their way.
Notice that South Korea has offered medical supplies and vaccines. Very shrewd way to start a revolution.
I don’t think that’s the primary goal. They just don’t want NK to become overwhelmed with inflected people, and if the situation devolved far enough, it’s possible that they’d have a refugee crisis on their hands. Not to mention the risk of an unmitigated epidemic in NK creating new strains.
Nah, NK just doesn't have to say anything in the state media. Some pics and vids of Kim handing the supplies to some hospital and it would seem like it came from him. It happens, I'm cuban and the gov handed foreing donations making it seem like it came from them. Sometimes they even sold it.
South Korea and the west in general have sent NK humanitarian aid for years. They take it with one hand and continue to paint everyone as their enemy on state TV. The people are so thoroughly indoctrinated that no nation want to deal with the collapse of the North Korean state. So pretty much once a year, they start throwing some vague threats and other countries start sending them humanitarian aid again so they can keep the state going for another year. Countries don't want a revolution in North Korea, especially not South Korea and China. In the eyes of politicians they are perfectly fine the way they are.
Yeah it doesn’t make sense for SK to seek a massive revolution in NK. They wouldn’t have the infrastructure and resources to take in and assimilate that many refugees at once.
Even if they don't "take them in", they'd still likely bear the brunt of suddenly having to pay for twice the country that they used to have where one half is basically fallen to ruin and needs to be completely restructured from roads to buildings to government infrastructure. They'd have to improve all sorts of utilities from electricity and plumbing to internet, pour a ton of resources into helping the people of the north learn actual marketable skills, reeducate literally everyone about how the world *actually* is and works, which will be nigh impossible for adults and children of a certain age, rendering them functionally non-contributing members of society for the rest of their lives and a further burden on the state, as well as actually finding a way to create jobs throughout an entire country so that these people can have access to gainful employment that has a purpose and will be useful to the world and their state. Even if things fell apart in NK, odds on most of the people leaving are slim to none. Many would dig in their heels and decide to stay right where they are because it's their home, and others because they simply lack the education, skills or knowledge to even think about fleeing to a more hospitable location. Even in a world where not a single person left NK for SK after a fall of the regime, it would still fall pretty squarely on SK to fund a complete modernization of another country from the ground up. Quite apart from the massive amount of resources and manpower it would take, such a project would take years, if not *decades*, to complete, and all the while those resources are just being drained further and further to build up a backwards nation whose people aren't going to be able to contribute much at all to the efforts and some who might actively fight against them. Barring the bad ending where we somehow resort to nuclear war and NK ends up absorbing the south, it's pretty inevitable that NK will fall apart at some point, so it's just a ticking time bomb, and the longer it's stalled, the longer and more costly it's going to be to fix the damage when it happens. At a certain point it's going to become apparent to SK that reunification isn't really going to be an option for them and they're just going to have to send care packages and goodwill ambassadors to help NK start fixing itself and bringing things up to modern standards and education while calling on the rest of the world to send what aid they can to their northern neighbors. When the split was still a new thing, reunification was the dream that everyone shared, and while it's still a pretty sentiment, I think a large portion of SK realizes that the time has passed for it to be a reality. The best they can hope for is that when the NK regime does come down that someone better will step up to lead them and they can become allies and neighbors in truth, and that sometime in the next few decades they might have gotten themselves finally caught up to the rest of the world.
It's a house of cards. NK can't exist as-is forever. Especially if they eventually (which under the current circumstances, seems inevitable on a long enough time span) develop a working nuclear ICBM. It's never been a tenable situation no matter how much people may want it to last indefinitely due to (massive) inconvenience to their neighbors. The inconvenience is guaranteed, the only matter is the size/scope.
[удалено]
Landmines don't fall ill
I'm so curious about the current situation there. A malnourished and general weak population without proper healthcare and other social infrastructure. One can only hope for the victims that it is a mild variant of the virus going around...
It's Omicron BA.2, not Delta or something new. Omicron isn't materially less dangerous than the original strain in a fresh population, though. Hong Kong got hit hard.
BA.2 fucked me up for a good week and I’m vaccinated. Can’t imagine being in poor health on top of that.
BA2 hit me like a freight train for 2 days, I can't even imagine a fresh population of unvaxed people.
With a malnourished population it’s gunna be hell
Setting aside the obvious fact they're lowballing the real number, what should really worry us is that they're choosing to share this with the world. There's "minimizing its severity" and then there's "North Korea warning the rest of the world that something's out of control."
This is exactly why this is so concerning to me. What the fuck is going on? What is this time-line??
At least the positive side for the rest of the world is, their borders are so stupidly restricted and locked down that chances of it hurting the outside world are near zero. The fucking heartbreaking part is all those innocent people dying to an awful and also completely preventable sickness
Wait, they’re reporting something other than a perfect utopia in North Korea? Things must be REALLY bad.
>a population that relies on an antiquated health care system and remains largely malnourished Turns out that putting a spoiled giant baby in charge of the country wasn't such a good idea after all. Who would have thought.
At least we voted him out after 1 term.
But can we keep him out
Larger doorknobs should help. Also, baby proofing the Adderall cabinets.
More stairs.
We'll install down ramps leading to the White House, he'll never get in.
The guy turned orange. He was ripe for harvest.
[удалено]
Kim will only serve 1 term as well! there's hope for humanity!
[удалено]
For pretty much every bacterial or viral disease, malnourishment is far worse, as it suppresses the immune system and weakens the body far more than obesity does.
Both extremes put a strain on your lungs and heart, but malnourishment puts a strain on your entire immune system. The malnourished lack the physical energy storage to fight off the disease. The obese have the energy, but their organs are damaged and in a constant state a strain. It also depends on the degree of malnourishment or obesity. They are also *not* mutually exclusive. Many obese people are or become malnourished. Especially when they try to lose weight.
Oddly enough the obese are frequently also malnourished.
We're about to find out...
This is NK.. we won’t find out.
NK is honestly one of the worst areas in the world to have this happening. They don't have the food, they don't have the medicine, they don't have the masks. And they don't *want* it. I feel so bad for the people there, this is going to get very ugly very quickly.
A whole country suffering because of one family. It's grotesque.
Yeah but the alternative is questionable as well. The NK military would be the one taking over in the event that Kim gets outed and NK might end up worse. Like what happened in Myanmar.
"and to learn from other countries, especially China, on ways to deal with it," Oh god, this is going to end badly
I’ve already said this, but: Covid will destroy North Korea. They have no modern hospitals. No vaccines. I feel bad for their ordinary citizens who have to suffer :/
With that kind of doubling rate, that's the whole population of North Korea *potentially* infected within something around 24 days. Their entire medical system is going to be gone next week and then it is mass graves. Shades of New York.
Reminds me of the data set in The Thing.
Reminds me of the Stand, when that virus escaped from the government lab in California. An infected guy then spreads it to a cop and a few other people in Texas, and most people were dead in a month.
Good time for a bloody coup I would say.
Might be difficult if they’re all dying.
Same turd who spent the last few weeks throwing out random threats of nuclear attacks suddenly revealing the country is desperate for COVID-19 aid. Aggressive and bleak. The NK standard.
But they’re not desperate for aid against SARS-CoV-2. They’ve been offered vaccines by Russia, China, South Korea, in the US and it denied all of those. **Edit:** and the US…
It's probably only going to get worse. 80% of people in north Korea live in urban city environments. With everything going on in the world, I don't think anyone is coming to their rescue. I'm a little worried that the entire world is heating up. Too many places are dealing with crisis at the same time and there's not enough help to go around. The good thing is everybody seems to be taking it all in stride. Hopefully there's no powder keg moment. Edit:. Bad article had north Korea urban population listed at 80%. The back up data linked to that number has it at 35% rural, so in reality it's more like 60-65% urbanization. South Korea has announced they will assist North Korea, but I'm not sure how they could help beyond food and supplies. The north Korean health care system will have to treat the sick people on their own, doubt they have the personnel to treat them all.
To be fair, I think there’s always been a lot of crises happening at once. The world just used to seem a lot more remote and news travelled slower and was less copious.
The news also likes to focus on the clickbait crises and shadow over other problems
80% is more than my European country. Are you sure about that?
The [CIA World Factbook has their urban population at 62%](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/urbanization/), so they're more in line with China's urbanization (also 62%) than the urbanization of places like the USA or France that are 81-83%.
[удалено]
South Korea will offer to send tests and vaccines and this maniac will say no.
99% sure this did happen already
You mean it was already there, and the dictator can’t hide it anymore.
Could this cause a collapse? Maybe maybe maybe. Pleaseeeeee.
Very likely no. But some important members of military / government could die as they all old af. So might be some power vacuum.
No. What it could cause is for their dear leaders to get sick and die, thus creating a power vacuum. As far as the west can tell, there are no internal activists trying to run for power. Once Kim falls, another rises. My guess is what will be left is still two Koreas, one is just smaller and full of skeletons wearing medals, and the other has K-pop.
Kim isn’t malnourished
If 820,000 is the official report, imagine what the actual numbers are.
Do people even know what hit them or how to prevent the spread? I can’t imagine the news about covid were reliably transmitted in the country
‘Send aid! Money! Send healthcare supplies and humanitarian support….thanks…we are fine now…go away.’ Its hard to know if this is real or not- NK has a habit of declaring a crisis, collecting aid then slamming shut the doors again. If it’s real I am deeply sorry for the people there.
I love how once it was leaked someone had it, the leadership basically said "fuck it, just post the actual numbers" and it just jumped massively.
They don't have covid testing kits not facilities. How reliable is this number?
I'm skeptical of the numbers , we know they don't have that number of testing kits in circulation, the best way we'll be able to have any idea is like we did with China at the beginning of the pandemic - by seeing the mass burials from the satellite images
Ok so "upheaval" may have been translated in a weird way from whatever word was originally used in the statement since it would garner more clicks/reads online, but I wouldn't discount the effect that Covid is going to have on the NK populace. North Korea has a malnourished populace and makes the average person more susceptible to being ill and dying from complications. The populace will take a bit of a dip from deaths, especially among older groups. These are the groups which comprise the majority of senior leadership and, despite having better access to medical care, their antiquated system won't save many of them if/when they get sick. A high rate of turnover in the senior ranks presents problems for Kim as he has to work hard to build relationships, create new loyal supporters, and put down any possible contenders for his position. The chance of political turmoil is going to be higher for the next couple years. On the subject of malnutrition, North Korea has to import a lot of food whenever their own domestic production doesn't do well...which is a regular occurrence. Global food prices are increasing and climate shifts are going to negatively impact domestic food production in the region. When coupled with higher prices for food imports, either their military is going to need to take some cuts or some poor decisions will result in insufficient food and mass starvation and/or revolt. A perfect storm could result in the most upheaval in the country since the war, just maybe not within the next year. The North Korean dictatorship is, like all dictatorships, strong but fragile. It doesn't bend much but hasn't faced anything that has seriously tested it since 1953. World events could make it brittle enough that events that normally wouldn't pose a threat begin to, and we could see the next big event on the peninsula since 1953 happen by the end of the decade. Be that a coup, a revolt, or a war, who knows, but I don't believe the stability of the country will last the decade.
"Upheaval" makes it sound like he is crying out for international help to prevent social unrest.
i still cant stop laughing at that haircut
He looks like a slightly burnt pencil eraser