Just after a week of reporting the coronavirus outbreak, North Korea has already registered nearly 2 million COVID-19 cases. Thursday saw 2,62,270 more cases of people with suspected symptoms of COVID-19 in the country. North Korea is also trying to prevent its fragile economy from deteriorating, but the outbreak could be worse than officially reported because of scarce resources for virus testing and the possibility that North Korea could be deliberately underreporting deaths to soften the political impact on authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's anti-virus headquarters reported a single death in the 24 hours to 6 pm Wednesday to bring its death toll to 63, which experts have said is abnormally small compared to the suspected number of infections.
The official Korean Central News Agency reported that more than 1.98 million people have become sick with feverish symptoms since late April, which are mostly believed to be coronavirus omicron variant infections, although the country has only confirmed a small number of infection cases because of the scarcity of tests.
At least 7,40,160 people are in quarantine, the news agency reported.
After maintaining a dubious claim that it had kept the virus out of the country for two and a half years, North Korea acknowledged its first COVID-19 infections last Thursday, saying that tests from an unspecified number of people in the capital Pyongyang showed they were infected with the omicron variant.
Kim has called the outbreak a “great upheaval” and has imposed what the country described as maximum preventive measures that strictly restricted the movement of people and supplies between cities and regions.
He mobilized more than 1 million workers to find and quarantine people with fevers and other suspected COVID-19 symptoms. Thousands of troops were ordered to help transport medicine to the capital of Pyongyang.
North Korea COVID-19 situation worsens: Why Kim Jong Un cannot afford a lockdown
Experts have said Kim cannot afford to bring the country to a standstill because that would unleash further shock on a broken economy damaged by mismanagement, crippling US-led sanctions over his nuclear weapons ambitions and pandemic border closures.
The country faces an urgent push to protect crops amid an ongoing drought that hit the country during a crucial rice-planting season, a worrisome development in a country that has long suffered from food insecurity.
North Korean state media also said that Kim's trophy construction projects, including the building of 10,000 new houses in the town of Hwasong, are being “propelled as scheduled.”
Meanwhile, it's unclear whether North Korea's admission of the outbreak communicates a willingness to receive outside help. The country has shunned millions of vaccine shots offered by the UN-backed COVAX distribution programme, likely because of international monitoring requirements that are required to receive the vaccines.
Experts have said North Korea may be more willing to accept help from China, its main ally.
(With inputs from AP)
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