North Korea is facing a Covid disaster. What does that mean for Kim Jong Un?

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un looks like he’s in big trouble. His country has announced an “explosive” outbreak of Covid-19, reporting more than 2 million cases of what it refers to as “fever” in little more than a week since its first reported case.

In a largely undeveloped and famously isolated country of 25 million, where the vast majority of people are thought to be unvaccinated, it has the potential to be a humanitarian disaster on the sort of scale that would threaten the grip on power of just about any government in the world.

But Pyongyang isn’t like any other government. In fact, some experts say that rather than weaken Kim the outbreak could make him more powerful — by giving him an excuse to tighten his grip.
Kim has at his disposal an extensive propaganda machine and an ability to block outside information that could help him shape the narrative of this crisis in his favor — much as his predecessors did with the 1990s famine thought to have starved hundreds of thousands of North Koreans to death. Back then, Pyongyang had framed its problems as an “Arduous March” — and blamed them partly on flooding and partly on American sanctions.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/20/asia/north-korea-covid-outbreak-drive-kim-jong-un-nukes-intl-hnk/index.html