The strict confinement imposed since 2020 to fight against Covid-19 is gradually easing in North Korea. Nationals who are abroad have been allowed to return home, the official KCNA news agency announced on Sunday August 27, citing the Epidemic Emergency Prevention Center.
“Returning individuals will be placed under medical observation in quarantine centers for a week”specifies the agency, adding that the decision was taken because of “the improvement of the epidemic situation at the global level”.
North Korea closed its borders in early 2020 to fight the pandemic, but signs of reopening are mounting. After three years of shutdown, the national airline Air Koryo has, for example, resumed international commercial flights. One of its planes landed in Beijing on Tuesday.
Last week a delegation of North Korean athletes was allowed to leave the country to compete in a taekwondo competition in Kazakhstan, and last month Chinese and Russian dignitaries attended a military parade in Pyongyang. They were the first senior foreign officials to visit North Korea in several years.
“With this latest announcement, it is expected that a large-scale return of North Koreans will also take place by land”said Cheong Seong-chang, researcher at the Sejong Institute, interviewed by Agence-Presse.
No full reopening
Despite signs of easing, some observers believe North Korea is not yet quite ready to reopen its borders.
“North Koreans have not been vaccinated”, recalls Cho Han-bum, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification. He adds that Pyongyang has likely been burned by the bottlenecks in China’s health system after Beijing’s sudden decision last December to end its zero Covid policy.
This had led to a sharp increase in the number of hospitalizations and deaths. According to some studies, nearly two million people died in the weeks that followed.
North Korea’s healthcare system is one of the weakest in the world. There are no vaccines against Covid or antiviral drugs and health authorities do not have the means to carry out large-scale tests. If fully reopened, the situation could be much worse than in China, Cho said.
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According to Leif-Eric Easley, professor at Ewha University in Seoul, the very limited resumption of flights to China and Russia, and the authorization of the return of expatriates “do not in any way constitute a complete reopening of the border”.