On Saturday, North Korea reported no new cases of the fever for the first time since it abruptly admitted its first domestic outbreak of COVID-19 and put its 26 million people under more draconian restrictions in May.
There have been widespread outside doubts about the accuracy of North Korea’s statistics, as its death toll is too low and its daily fever cases have plummeted too quickly recently.
Some experts say North Korea has likely manipulated the scale of illness and death to help leader Kim Jong Un maintain absolute control amid mounting economic hardship.
The northern anti-epidemic center said through state media that it had found zero fever patients in the past 24 hours, keeping the country’s total caseload at about 4.8 million.
A teacher takes his body temperature at a school to help slow the spread of the coronavirus before entering Kim Song Ju Elementary School in the central district of Pyongyang, North Korea. (AP)
Its death toll remains at 74, with a fatality rate of 0.0016%, the lowest in the world, if true.
Despite zero confirmed cases, it is unclear whether North Korea would formally declare victory over COVID-19 and lift the lid on the pandemic as experts say it could face a viral resurgence later this year like many others countries.
North Korea’s state media has recently said it is ramping up and upgrading its anti-epidemic systems to protect against sub-variants of the coronavirus and other diseases such as monkeypox.
“The unique organizational power and unity of (North Korea’s) society is on full display in the struggle to achieve victory in the emergency anti-epidemic campaign,” the Korean Central News Agency said on Saturday. .
North Korea’s claimed zero cases could be symbolic in its efforts to establish Kim’s image as a leader who has suppressed the outbreak much more quickly than other countries.
Kim would need those credentials to garner greater public support to overcome economic difficulties caused by pandemic border closures, UN sanctions and his own mismanagement, observers say.
A visitor observes the North Korean side from the Unification Observation Post in Paju, South Korea. (AP) Visitors watch the North Korean side from the unification observation site in Paju, South Korea, near the border. (AP)
“In North Korea, public health and politics cannot be separated from each other, and this aspect has been revealed again in its COVID-19 outbreak,” said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG , a website focused on health issues in North Korea.
“Since they started with manipulated data, they are now ending the outbreak with manipulated data.”
North Korea was expected to claim zero cases as its daily fever burden has plunged in recent days (there were three reported cases on Friday and 11 on Thursday), from a high of about 400,000 a day in May.
The country, which lacks test kits, has identified only a fraction of its 4.8 million fever patients as confirmed cases of COVID-19.
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“In realistic terms, hundreds of thousands of daily fever cases reaching zero in less than three months is an impossible thing,” said Lee Yo Han, a professor at the School of Public Health at Ajou University in Korea. from the South
Many outside experts were concerned before the outbreak in the north would have devastating consequences because most of its people are believed to be unvaccinated and about 40 percent are reportedly malnourished.
But now activists and defectors with contacts in North Korea say they have not heard of a humanitarian disaster. They say the country’s outbreak has also likely peaked.
In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits a pharmacy in Pyongyang. (AP)
In a sign of a wave of calm, North Korea this week held mass public unmasked events in its capital, Pyongyang, where thousands of Korean War veterans and others gathered from around the country to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the end of 1950. -53 war.
During a birthday ceremony, Kim hugged and exchanged handshakes with some veterans before taking group photos with other participants.
None were wearing masks, according to state media photographs.
Shin Young-jeon, a professor of preventive medicine at Hanyang University in Seoul, said North Korea would know that zero cases does not mean it has no patients with COVID-19 because there are likely asymptomatic cases.
He said North Korea probably won’t announce that it has officially beaten the pandemic anytime soon because of concerns about a resurgence.
“North Korea’s state media has already used expressions as if it is winning its anti-virus fight. The only other expression it can use now is to declare that the coronavirus has been completely eliminated from its territory,” Shin said.
“But if new cases emerge again, North Korea would lose face.”
The only route for North Korea’s new viral spread from abroad is likely to be China, its main ally that shares a long and porous border, and North Korea would be hard-pressed to declare victory over the pandemic until let China do it, Lee said.
In this June 28, 2022 photo released by the North Korean government, North Korean employees disinfect an underground store facility in Pyongyang, North Korea. Independent journalists were not allowed to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. The watermark in Korean on the image provided by the source reads: “KCNA”, which is short for Korean Centra (AP)
The border between North Korea and China has been largely closed for more than 2.5 years, except for a few months when it was reopened earlier this year.
Some observers say the North’s heightened pandemic response has given Kim a tool to push his authoritarian rule amid public complaints about the longstanding restrictions.
They say North Korea could report a small number of fever cases again in the coming days.
Young people gather to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending the fighting of the Korean War. (AP)
Foreign experts struggle to assess the true death toll in North Korea.
They note that a shortage of test kits in the north would also make it virtually impossible for the country to determine whether elderly people or others with underlying illnesses died from COVID-19 or something else.
Shin, the university professor, stood by his earlier study that predicted North Korea would suffer between 100,000 and 150,000 deaths.
It said it used data from South Korea that showed its death rate for unvaccinated people for the omicron variant, whose outbreak North Korea admitted in May, was 0.6 percent.
Other experts say the death toll in the North would be a few thousand at most. They said North Korean monitoring groups must have detected a higher death toll.