It's been only a month since North Korea acknowledged having a COVID-19 outbreak, after denying any cases for more than two years. But already it may be preparing to declare victory.
“There are two sides to such a declaration,” said Moon Seong Mook, an analyst with the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy. “If North Korea says that COVID-19 has gone, it can emphasize that Kim Jong Un is a great leader who has overcome the pandemic. But in doing so, it can’t maintain the powerful restrictions that it uses to control its people in the name of containing COVID-19.
In the initial stage of the outbreak, Kim described a “great upheaval” as daily fever cases — North Korea rarely calls them COVID-19, presumably because it lacks test kits — reached about 400,000. Now, however, the leader is suggesting that the outbreak has peaked, with his health officials maintaining a widely disputed fatality rate of 0.002%, the lowest in the world.
“If a large number of people had died, there would have been some pieces of evidence, but there hasn’t been any,” said Nam Sung-wook, a professor at Korea University in South Korea. During a huge famine in the 1990s, for instance, rumors of widespread death and of people abandoning bodies spread outside of the country, into China and South Korea.
Cho Joonghoon, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which oversees relations with North Korea, told reporters last week that the North may announce its COVID-19 crisis has been resolved this month. Kang, the defector, said that North Korean residents in Hyesan abide by the government’s anti-pandemic orders and that few fever patients go outside during quarantine periods.
Despite its COVID-19 outbreak, North Korea has continued test-firing missiles this year. But it hasn’t yet carried out a widely expected nuclear test, possibly because of worries about a potential backlash from people still struggling with the virus.
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