Korea National Insurance Corporation (KNIC) recently became the last of North Korea’s five insurers to release financial data for 2022, doing so when it launched a redesigned website last month.

And while the country’s largest insurer only registered a relatively minor 3.3% decrease in overall profits, this concealed a much larger slump in the life insurance business that betrays a sobering reality — that far more people died in the country’s COVID-19 outbreak that year than the government has let on.

According to KNIC’s official data, premium income in the life insurance sector dropped