North Korean state television has since Friday resumed coverage of domestic COVID-19 prevention efforts, NK News has observed, in the wake of warnings from leader Kim Jong Un that officials were growing too complacent in the face of the virus.

Korean Central Television (KCTV) and other state-run outlets in late March abruptly stopped showing scenes such as workers sanitizing surfaces, doctors discussing policies and propaganda on the novel coronavirus, and citizens receiving temperature checks in public.

But such footage returned to the airwaves as part of the nightly 20:00 news bulletin on Friday, the same day as Kim Jong Un’s warnings made the previous day at a Politburo meeting were announced. 

Kim in that meeting was reported to have warned that failure to follow COVID-19 prevention measures “will result in an unimaginable and unrecoverable fatal crisis” for the country. 

He also “made sharp criticism of inattention, onlooking and chronic attitude getting prevalent among officials, and violation of the rules of the emergency anti-epidemic work.”

The July 3 news segment was brief at only 25 seconds, and showed workers at a health spa sanitizing surfaces, as well as stock footage of Pyongyangites wearing masks on the street.

The anchor finished the segment by declaring that viewers “must reexamine prevention efforts and more strictly” carry them out.

Friday’s broadcast was followed up with additional coverage in the 20:00 news over the weekend, with efforts inside the Moranbong district People’s Hospital featured on Saturday and another short series of clips on Sunday.

Those clips included some recycled footage, but showed officials and a police officer in a meeting presumably on the virus, a woman washing her hands, and temperature checks on citizens entering a public building. 

KCTV news segments had since March 22 only shown footage of coronavirus prevention work in other countries and only rarely discussed the domestic situation, while special segments on personal hygiene and sanitizing personal items gradually disappeared in April.

The international segment had earlier been replaced with one exclusively on the coronavirus, until general foreign news items returned to the end of the bulletin on May 24.

And while the domestic situation was also depicted briefly in this section of the evening news on June 24, before the last week’s Politburo meeting, the anchor only repeated a common slogan and no scenes of active prevention measures were shown. 

It is unclear why visual depictions of domestic COVID-19 measures disappeared in March, but the coordinated and sustained nature of their omission following two months of heavy coverage suggested a deliberate decision may have been handed down to all major state outlets.

It is possible a similar decision was made in the wake of last Thursday’s Politburo meeting, at which Kim Jong Un urged citizens to “further strengthen the emergency anti-epidemic work.”

Text articles on efforts within the country, on the other hand, were consistently published in the ruling party daily Rodong Sinmun throughout the period every few days.

These have continued in recent days, encouraging compliance with Kim’s warnings last week and, in an editorial at the top of the front page Sunday, repeating parts of his speech and emphasizing all aspects of prevention measures must be reexamined.

The claim that “there has still yet to be a single person in our country to be infected” with the virus also appeared again in the newspaper on Saturday.

Not a single article was published in the Rodong on the domestic COVID-19 situation on Monday, however. Unlike KCTV, the paper has yet to restart publishing images of the domestic work.

Edited by Oliver Hotham