North Korea Bans Indoor Public Smoking, Still Claims Zero Coronavirus Cases

North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), a communist rubber-stamp legislature, passed a law on Wednesday banning smoking in public areas, locations used for “ideological education,” and health and child facilities.

The law, North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun state newspaper reported, is intended to protect the health of citizens. Lawmakers also passed new provisions to make more North Koreans into “patriotic working people.”

The law passes as experts outside the repressive country believe that dictator Kim Jong-un is fighting an increasingly severe wave of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated by North Korea’s nearly nonexistent healthcare system and its close proximity to the origin of the virus, China, and Russia, which has documented one of the world’s highest coronavirus case rates. The communist government in Pyongyang continues to deny that it has documented a single case of Chinese coronavirus within its territory in its history.

The anti-smoking law raised questions among outside observers about Kim’s health, as well, as the dictator often appears in state propaganda photos smoking and is believed to be a heavy smoker. The law does not appear to affect smoking in private, which would indicate that Kim could continue to partake in the activity.

Rodong Sinmun explained:

The tobacco-prohibition law with 31 provisions stipulates the rules which all the institutions, organizations and citizens must follow in protecting the lives and health of the people and providing more cultured and hygienic living environments by tightening the legal and social controls on the production and sale of cigarettes.

The outlet also stated that “the law specifies places and units in which smoking is forbidden,” listing “places for political and ideological education,” movie theaters, schools, “public health facilities,” and public transportation.

The state newspaper claimed the lawmakers adopted the new provision unanimously. They also passed an “enterprise law” to “stipulate contents of making enterprises labor-, energy-, cost-, and land-saving ones and of making the employees patriotic working people who regard the spirit of economy as part of their mental qualities.”

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency noted that SPA meetings are uncommon in the country, as it does not undergo the same processes of lawmaking as free states do, with regular drafting, debating, and voting on legislation. It also noted that North Korea is believed to have high rates of smoking among its population and that Kim himself has a reputation for enjoying smoking. According to Reuters, nearly 44 percent of men in North Korea smoke; it is considered culturally inappropriate for women to smoke.

Reuters added:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is known as a chain smoker who is frequently seen with a cigarette in hand in photographs in state media. Kim was spotted taking a cigarette break at a railway station in the southern Chinese city of Nanning in 2019 on his way to Hanoi for his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

The new law comes into effect as mounting evidence suggests that Pyongyang is struggling to contain its coronavirus outbreak. Prior to the law passing on Wednesday, North Korean authorities launched a website in its minimally available national Internet – separate from the global Internet, which the law bans North Koreans from accessing – to help citizens quit smoking. The website reportedly offered scientific information on the ill health effects of smoking and ways to abandon the habit. While studies remain inconclusive on the effect of smoking on Chinese coronavirus patients specifically, studies have long shown that smoking causes severe lung damage and exacerbates the effects of nearly all respiratory diseases because of the deteriorated state a smoker’s lungs are in when infected.

In March, at the height of the pandemic in China and the beginning of outbreaks in Russia, Kim announced the construction of the Pyongyang General Hospital, the first health facility of its size built in the country in years.

“Our Party analyzed and assessed the present state of public health service, medical service, in the country,” Kim said in the announcement, “and, feeling miserably self-critical of the fact that there is no perfect and modern medical service establishment even in the capital city, discussed and decided on building in this year of the 75th anniversary of its founding a modern general hospital first in Pyongyang for the promotion of people’s health.”

Last month, reports from within the country suggested that Kim had launched a campaign to crack down on the illegal production of unregulated sanitary masks, which may not meet the standards necessary to protect from disease. North Korean authorities also published a bizarre warning that dust clouds from China could bring the coronavirus into the country, which is not a concern that scientists in the free world have raised about how the virus travels.

General Robert B. Abrams, commander of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), said in an interview in September that American officials believe North Korea is struggling against a significant outbreak of the coronavirus, one that has resulted in the Korean border becoming more peaceful as Pyongyang funnels its efforts into fighting the virus and away from antagonizing South Korea or America.

“With COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus], that has accelerated the effects of sanctions on North Korea,” Abrams told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “They closed their border at the end of January. If you just look back at the sanctions in 2017, that dropped Chinese imports by about 50 percent and then they rebounded last year.”

Abrams added that the North Korean military has “shoot-to-kill orders in place, and this is fundamentally about preventing COVID from getting into North Korea.”

North Korea’s latest update to the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) this week once again claimed it had not identified a single case of the Chinese coronavirus within its borders, covering a period that ended on October 29.

“But in reality some 5,368 people are said to have tested positive, an oddly specific number suggesting an official leak, and eight of them were reportedly foreigners,” South Korea’s conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported on Wednesday, claiming that number originated from anonymous W.H.O. officials.

North Korean media claimed that anti-coronavirus efforts were “steadily intensifying” on Wednesday.

“The central emergency anti-epidemic units have taken a series of measures to enclose the land, the air and the seas of the country with reliable anti-epidemic walls,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) claimed. “The emergency anti-epidemic units across the country are ratcheting up the agitprop offensive to encourage all the working people to turn out as one in the anti-epidemic work.”