SEOUL: North Korea is on the path to “finally defuse” a crisis stemming from its first acknowledged outbreak of Covid-19, the state news agency said, while Asian neighbours battle a fresh wave of infections driven by Omicron subvariants.
The North yesterday says 99.98% of its 4.77 million fever patients since late April have fully recovered, but due to an apparent lack of testing, it has not released any figures of those that proved positive.
“The anti-epidemic campaign is improved to finally defuse the crisis completely,” KCNA said. It added that the North had reported 310 more people with fever symptoms.
The World Health Organization has cast doubts on North Korea’s claims, saying last month it believed the situation was getting worse, not better, amid an absence of independent data.
The North’s declaration could be a prelude to restoring trade long hampered by the pandemic, one analyst said.
Analysts say the authoritarian North has used the pandemic to tighten already strict social controls. Pyongyang blamed its outbreak on “alien things” near its border with the South.
Lacking a public vaccination effort, the North said it was running intensive medical checks nationwide, with daily PCR tests on water collected in borderline areas among the measures.
The North also said it has been developing new methods to better detect the virus and its variants, as well as other infectious diseases, such as monkeypox.
North Korea’s claim of “anti-epidemic stability” comes as other Asian countries grapple with a new wave of infections. China reported 691 new cases for Saturday with locally transmitted infections at a peak since May 23.
In the neighbouring South, daily Covid infections jumped on Tuesday above 40,000 for the first time in two months, with authorities and experts predicting hundreds of thousands of new cases in coming weeks. — Reuters
