North Korea Reports More Fevers as Kim Claims Virus Progress
North Korea said Saturday it found nearly 220,000 more
people with feverish symptoms even as leader Kim Jong Un claimed progress in
slowing a largely undiagnosed spread of COVID-19 across an unvaccinated
population of 26 million.
The outbreak has caused concern about serious tragedies in the poor, isolated country with one of the world's worst health care systems and a high tolerance for civilian suffering.
Experts say North Korea is almost
certainly downplaying the true scale of the viral spread, including a strangely
small death toll, to soften the political blow on Kim as he navigates the
toughest moment in his decade of rule.
Around 219,030 North Koreans with fevers were identified in
the 24 hours through 6 p.m. Friday, the fifth straight daily increase of around
200,000, according to the North's Korean Central News Agency, which attributed
the information to the government's anti-virus headquarters.
North Korea said more than 2.4 million people have fallen ill and 66 people have died since an unidentified fever began quickly spreading in late April, although the country has only been able to identify a handful of those cases as COVID-19 due to a lack of testing supplies.
After maintaining a
dubious claim for 2 1/2 years that it had perfectly blocked the virus from
entering its territory, the North admitted to omicron infections last week.
Amid a paucity of public health tools, the North has mobilized more than a million health workers to find people with fevers and isolate them at quarantine facilities.
Kim also imposed strict restrictions on
travel between cities and towns and mobilized thousands of troops to help with
the transport of medicine to pharmacies in the country's capital, Pyongyang,
which has been the center of the outbreak.
During a ruling party Politburo meeting on Saturday, Kim insisted the country was starting to bring the outbreak under control and called for tightened vigilance to maintain the “affirmative trend” in the anti-virus campaign, KCNA said.
But Kim also seemed to hint at relaxing his
pandemic response to ease his economic woes, instructing officials to actively
modify the country's preventive measures based on the changing virus situation
and to come up with various plans to revitalize the national economy.
KCNA said Politburo members debated ways for “more
effectively engineering and executing” the government's anti-virus policy in
accordance with how the spread of the virus was being “stably controlled and
abated,” but the report did not specify what was discussed.
Even while imposing what state media described as “maximum”
preventive measures, Kim has stressed that his economic goals still should be
met, and state media have described large groups of workers continuing to
gather at farms, mining facilities, power stations and construction sites.
Experts say Kim can't afford to bring the country to a
standstill that would unleash further shock on a fragile economy, strained by
decades of mismanagement, crippling U.S.-led sanctions over his nuclear weapons
ambitions and pandemic border closures.
State media have portrayed an urgent push for agricultural
campaigns aimed at protecting crops amid an ongoing drought, a worrisome
development in a country that has long suffered from food insecurity, and for
completing large-scale housing and other construction projects Kim sees as
crucial to his rule.
The virus hasn't stopped Kim from holding and attending
important public events for his leadership. State media showed him weeping
during Saturday's state funeral for top North Korean military official Hyon
Chol Hae, who is believed to have been involved in grooming Kim as a future
leader during the rule of his father, Kim Jong Il.
North Korea's optimistic description of its pandemic response starkly contrasts with outside concerns about dire consequences, including deaths that may reach tens of thousands. The worries have grown as the country apparently tries to manage the crisis in isolation while ignoring help from South Korea and the United States.
South Korea's government has said
it couldn't confirm reports that North Korea had flown aircraft to bring back
emergency supplies from ally China this week.
The North in recent years has shunned millions of vaccine doses offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because of international monitoring requirements attached to those shots.
The WHO and
UNICEF have said North Korea so far has been unresponsive to their requests for
virus data or proposals for help, and some experts say the North may be willing
to accept a certain level of fatalities to gain immunity through infection.
It's possible at least some of North Korea's fever caseload
are from non-COVID-19 illnesses such as water-borne diseases, which according
to South Korean intelligence officials have become a growing problem for the
North in recent years amid shortages in medical supplies.
But experts say the explosive pace of spread and North Korea's lack of a testing regime to detect large numbers of virus carriers in early stages of infection suggest the country's COVID-19 crisis is likely worse than what its fever numbers represent.
They say the country's real virus
fatalities would be significantly larger than the official numbers and that
deaths will further surge in coming weeks considering the intervals between
infections and deaths.
North Korea's admission of a COVID-19 outbreak came amid a
provocative run of weapons tests, including the country's first demonstration
of an intercontinental ballistic missile since 2017 in March, as Kim pushes a
brinkmanship aimed at pressuring the United States to accept the idea of the
North as a nuclear power and negotiating economic and security concessions from
a position of strength.
The challenges posed by a decaying economy and the COVID-19
outbreak are unlikely to slow his pressure campaign. U.S. and South Korean
officials have said there's a possibility the North conducts another ballistic
missile test or nuclear explosive test during or around President Joe Biden's
visits to South Korea and Japan this week.
Nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang have
stalled for more than three years over disagreements over how to relax
crippling U.S.-led sanctions in exchange for disarmament steps by the North.
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