Seoul, South Korea Choi Jung-hun smiled as I read out the latest official Covid-19 figures from North Korean state media: fewer than 5 million cases of “fever” and just 73 fatalities — a fraction of the death toll of every other country in the world.
“North Koreans call them rubber band statistics,” he said, in a nod toward Pyongyang’s flexibility with the truth. “It’s hard even for North Korea to know its own numbers.”
He speaks with some authority. Choi was a doctor for more than 10 years in North Korea, specializing in infectious diseases before he fled his home country in 2011.
Doctors like Choi could only privately suspect SARS was to blame. North Korea had no ability to test for the disease, so officially it recorded zero infections. Its neighbor China reported more than 5,000 cases and hundreds of deaths.
Choi can also remember dealing with a nationwide measles outbreak in 2006, armed only with a thermometer; and a 2009 flu pandemic in which even “more people died than during SARS” — a situation made worse by an acute shortage of medicine.
In previous epidemics, Choi explains, there was never an incentive for local officials to travel house to house to accurately count cases — they had no masks or gloves and they figured statistics would be massaged by the regime to suit its needs.