Virus outbreak causing great upheaval: Kim
PYONGYANG: Leader Kim Jong Un said a COVID-19 outbreak is causing “great upheaval” in North Korea, which announced 21 new “fever” deaths on Saturday.
Two days ater confirming its first cases of COVID-19, the government said more than half a million people had been sickened nationwide.
Despite activating its “maximum emergency quarantine system” to slow the spread of disease through its unvaccinated population, North Korea is now reporting tens of thousands of new cases daily.
On Friday, “over 174,440 persons had fever, at least 81,430 were fully recovered and 21 died in the country,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
North Korea confirmed on Thursday that the highly contagious Omicron variant had been detected in the capital Pyongyang, with Kim ordering nationwide lockdowns.
It was the government’s first official admission of COVID-19 cases and marked the failure of a two-year coronavirus blockade maintained at great economic cost since the start of the pandemic.
From late April to May 13, more than 524,440 people have fallen sick with fever, KCNA said, with 27 deaths in total.
The report did not specify whether the new cases and deaths had tested positive for COVID-19, but experts say the country will be struggling to test and diagnose on this scale.
North Korea has said only that one of the first six deaths it announced Friday had tested positive for COVID-19.
“It’s not a stretch to consider these ‘fever’ cases to all be COVID-19, given the North’s lack of testing capacity,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute.
“The actual number of COVID-19 cases could be higher than the fever figures due to many asymptomatic cases,” he said, adding that the pace of infection was growing “very fast.”
Kim said on Saturday the “crisis” was causing “great upheaval,” as he oversaw a second Politburo meeting in three days to discuss the situation, KCNA reported.
“The spread of malignant disease comes to be a great upheaval in our country since the founding of the DPRK,” he said, referring to North Korea by its official name.
Kim is puting himself “front and centre” of the country’s COVID-19 response, said Leif-eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.