North Korea has reported no new “fever” cases for the first time since mid-May, when it abruptly announced its first domestic outbreak of COVID-19 and imposed tough measures to curb the spread of the virus.
North Korea’s state emergency anti-epidemic center said it found no patients with a fever in the most recent 24-hour period, state media reported Saturday.
He said the total number of cases was about 4.8 million and about 99.99 percent of patients had fully recovered. Some 74 people have died from the virus, according to official figures, which would make the North’s death rate of 0.0016 percent the lowest in the world.
Shin Young-jeon, a professor at Hanyang University’s medical school in Seoul, said such a low death toll was almost “impossible” to achieve.
“It could be the result of a combination of lack of testing capacity, counting issues given the fact that older people are more likely to die from COVID-19, mostly from home, and political reasons why leaders are not they want to publish a massive death toll. ”, he wrote in an analysis published on Friday.
Infectious disease experts have questioned official updates on the North Korea outbreak from the start, with the World Health Organization (WHO) saying last month that it believed the situation was getting worse, not better, amid from the absence of independent data.
Many also worried that an outbreak in the isolated country of 26 million would have devastating consequences because few people were vaccinated, many were malnourished and the health system was in a dilapidated state.
“The unique organizational power and unity of (North Korea’s) society is fully displayed in striving to achieve a victory in the emergency anti-epidemic campaign by fully executing the anti-epidemic policies of the party and the state,” said the official. the Korean Central News Agency said on Saturday.
mass celebrations
Earlier this month, Pyongyang said it was on track to “finally defuse” the outbreak, even as its neighbors experienced a resurgence of cases driven by Omicron subvariants.
The daily number of cases has fallen sharply in recent days with three cases reported on Friday and 11 on Thursday compared to a peak of around 400,000 per day in May. The country has identified only a fraction of patients as confirmed cases of COVID-19 due to a lack of testing kits.
In a sign of the outbreak slowing, North Korea last week held huge public events in the capital Pyongyang, where thousands of elderly Korean War veterans and others from across the country gathered to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the war. end of the Korean War. Photos shared on state media showed few people wearing masks.
Shin Young-jeon, a professor of preventive medicine at Seoul Hanyang University, says North Korea knows that zero cases does not mean there is no COVID-19 due to the prevalence of asymptomatic cases, so it is unlikely to announce that it has passed. officially the pandemic. anytime.
“North Korea’s state media has already used expressions as if it is winning its fight against the virus. The only other expression they can use now is to declare that the coronavirus has been completely eliminated from their territory,” Shin said. “But if new cases emerge again, North Korea would lose face.”
Given the country’s long and porous border with China, North Korea’s main ally, it will probably also find it difficult to announce victory over the pandemic until China does, said Lee Yo Han, a professor at the Graduate School of Public Health. from Ajou University in the South. Korea.
The border between North Korea and China has been largely closed for more than two and a half years, except for a few months when it reopened earlier this year, and it is not yet clear if it will reopen.
China is currently battling a series of COVID-19 outbreaks in various cities across the country, but remains committed to its zero-COVID strategy of eradicating the virus wherever it appears.
“As state media have also been talking about variants, it remains to be seen whether they will ease the virus rules and lift the border lockdown,” said an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which handles cross-border relations.
KCNA said a rapid mobile treatment force remained on high alert and efforts were underway to “detect and eradicate the epidemic” until the last patient had fully recovered.