North Korean authorities ‘frantically’ trying to combat coronavirus including executing people

They are, however, running into great difficulty, since the country's healthcare system is so deficient and incapable of dealing with a crisis of this magnitude.

According to the New York Post, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il closed down the country's capital of Pyongyang as well as Jagang Province in the north of the country in an effort to halt or slow the spread of the virus.

He has also reportedly "executed two people" and banned all fishing on the country's coasts, as well as stopped the production of all salt in the county.

"The tyrant has been lashing out with ‘excessive anger’ and taking ‘irrational measures’ in recent weeks as a result of the pandemic," reported Ha Tae-keung, a South Koran intelligence official, during a briefing.

The two people executed by the regime were reportedly an illegal money-exchanger and another person involved in the importation of illegal goods.

North Korea shares a land border with China, where the novel coronavirus originated. For months, Kim Jong Il maintained that there was not a single case of the virus within his borders, which was considered doubtful by most of the rest of the world.

The South China Morning Post reports:

"Almost a year into the global emergency, a growing body of unverified reports and testimony from inside the notoriously secretive country is fuelling doubt about the North’s claimed clean bill of health.

The steady trickle of information – much of it based on second or third-hand recounting of claims by anonymous sources inside North Korea – raises the possibility of a humanitarian disaster in a country with poor medical care and widespread chronic malnourishment.

Tim Peters, a Christian activist who runs Seoul-based non-profit Helping Hands Korea, said sources in the North had reported the establishment of 'quarantine camps” in cities near the Chinese border where medical neglect and starvation were common."