Concerns over possible North Korean 2019-nCoV cases
The critical region to my mind in the 2019-2020 Coronavirus outbreak is North Korea, as previously mentioned.
It's adjacent to and has strong commercial and tourism ties with China. It is an authoritarian regime with poor internal communications, freedom of speech, or tolerance for views divergent with the administration. It has few resources and a poor history of dealing with epidemics. And its climate and current weather conditions are highly favourable to Coronavirus which thrives in cold and dry conditions.
And it's been claiming no cases of 2019-nCoV, which seems increasingly unlikely.
There are unofficial reports that there have been cases, though this is also problematic: dissidents inside and outside North Korea have a tendency to tell sources what they want to believe. Unfortunately this is a case of low-trust communications all around.
And now, via NPR, indications that my fears seem shared:
...North Korea's track record of fighting epidemics does not bode well for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, other experts warn. Other communicable diseases are widespread in the country, which has one of the world's highest rates of tuberculosis and an estimated 15% of the population is infected with Hepatitis B.
"Past epidemics that originated in China have always spread to North Korea, and vice versa," says Choi Jung-hoon, a North Korean neurologist who defected to South Korea in 2012. During the 2003 SARS epidemic and other disease outbreaks, he says, cases in North Korea often went unreported or under-reported....
