North Korea moves to soften curbs amid doubts over Covid-19 counts
They maintained a widely disputed claim that the country’s first Covid-19 outbreak is slowing.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other top officials discussed revising stringent anti-epidemic restrictions during a meeting on Sunday, state media reported.
They maintained a widely disputed claim that the country’s first Covid-19 outbreak is slowing.
The discussion at the North’s Politburo meeting suggests it will soon relax a set of curbs imposed after its admission of the Omicron outbreak this month out of concern about its food and economic situations.
Mr Kim and other Politburo members “made a positive evaluation of the pandemic situation being controlled and improved across the country,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
On Sunday, North Korea reported 89,500 more patients with fever symptoms, taking the country’s total to 3.4 million. It did not say whether there were additional deaths.
The country’s latest death toll reported on Friday was 69, setting its mortality rate at 0.002%, an extremely low count that no other country, including advanced economies, has reported in the fight against Covid-19.
Many outside experts say North Korea is clearly understating its fatality rate to prevent any political damage to Mr Kim at home. They say North Korea should have suffered many more deaths because its 26 million people are largely unvaccinated against Covid-19 and it lacks the capacity to treat patients with critical conditions. Others suspect North Korea might have exaggerated its earlier fever cases to try to strengthen its internal control of its population.
But many outside health experts view most of the reported fever cases as Covid-19, saying North Korean authorities would know how to distinguish the symptoms from fevers caused by other prevalent infectious diseases.
The outbreak has forced North Korea to impose a nationwide lockdown, isolate all work and residential units from one another and ban region-to-region movements. The country still allows key agricultural, construction and other industrial activities, but the toughened restrictions have triggered worries about its food insecurity and a fragile economy already hit hard by pandemic-caused border shutdowns.
