North Korea—where there have been no reported covid diagnoses, but lots of speculation about the leader’s health—is a particularly difficult story to cover. In 2008, when it was Jean H. Lee’s first day as the chief of the Associated Press’s Korea bureau, she learned that Kim Jong-il, then the country’s supreme leader, had disappeared—he didn’t show up for a major holiday pageant. “I knew immediately that something was wrong, because he should have been there,” Lee recalled.