North Korea reports 18,000 Covid cases today. Yesterday the number was 1

Originally published at: North Korea reports 18,000 Covid cases today. Yesterday the number was 1 | Boing Boing

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This is a serious situation, but the rise from 1 - 18,000 in one day is a testing and admin issue. There are only 1440 minutes per day

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It’s a challenge to believe any news coming out of that country

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This never would have happened if President Dennison was still in office.
/s

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Gosh, things is kooky in North Korea :north_korea:.

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This is pretty weird considering it was pretty clear NK was being hammered by covid starting back in early 2020. They waited over two years to finally admit that covid was in the country, but did so this way? By pretending it was the first case, and then suddenly revising the numbers to the tens of thousands? That’s all very… not North Korean of them, as it seems really inept, and pretending it’s only hitting now strains credulity to a breaking point.

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Yeah, seems odd. Hoping for some kind of aid? Catching up when they know it’s under control so that they can claim victory for a moment? Padding the numbers with dissidents?

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The official numbers from NK are up to 350,000 as of this morning

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“Hours after confirming the outbreak, North Korea launched three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea in an apparent display of strength.”

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Came here to say the same. COVID reporting numbers from most countries are terrible. It’s a function of how much testing is being done, and the answer is very little in most places. Well below what’s needed for even a statistically significant sample in the US, for example (which doesn’t even gather the death data federally in a consistent and reliable way).

The takeaway is that COVID cases everywhere are definitely vastly underreported. We’ll probably never know how bad COVID has really been, aside from excess death numbers (which don’t reflect long COVID, economic losses from people who have milder cases but recover, etc).

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