These days there are a lot of tourist videos, and you can find some North Korean films or cartoons if you look hard enough (letterboxd + YouTube help for films). You can visit if you have a passport, but some passports are barred like those from the US.

But official communications are limited and journalism around North Korea by outside journalists is usually time-lagged and hearsay. As a rule, outside news about North Korea is easy to exaggerate, but Covid-19 is a deadly pandemic and is still an active threat.

You can visit depending on where your passport is from. I know you can't normally visit with a US passport, I'm not sure who else is barred but Europeans are usually fine.

It's more normal than most people expect, there are a lot of videos these days. Not a lot of private cars, people in the city mostly travel by public transit (buses and subways). There are parks, water parks (I am bothered by there being a rock climbing gym in one), fried food vendors, karaoke, etc. It's nice to see since I used to think it would be more 1984.

It could be a matter of fearing a public scare. A lot of countries still have difficulty getting vaccines, and North Korea would reasonably stand to have an even greater difficulty considering their isolation and lack of sea trade routes. They'd have to get their vaccines from China, and considering their low trade capacity I doubt they could pay for them.

So unless they ask for help from China, they aren't getting vaccines anytime soon. Whether they've done so and failed, or are simply too proud to do so, I don't know, but they don't have any other way to get those vaccines.

They have the lowest military spending in the region, they're just poor. It's a resource poor area, and they don't exactly cultivate many trade relationships. Isolation is not a strong economic choice, apparently.