North Korea’s strict border closure and constraints on domestic movement in response to COVID-19 quickly triggered an exodus of humanitarian and U.N. workers. Already a small community at the best of times, the final nongovernmental and U.N. system workers left Pyongyang in March 2021.

Little humanitarian cargo has reached the North since the pandemic either, and the one shipment confirmed by UNICEF last year didn’t clear quarantine until earlier this month. 

Although freight trains appear to have resumed operations at the North Korea-China border for the first time in a year and