Kim attends official’s funeral amid worries of COVID
A large number of North Koreans including leader Kim Jong Un attended a funeral for a top official, state media reported Monday, as the country maintained the much-disputed claim that its suspected coronavirus outbreak is subsiding.
Since admitting earlier this month to an outbreak of the omicron variant, North Korea has only stated how many people have fevers daily and has only identified a few of the cases as COVID-19. Its state media said Monday that 2.8 million people have fallen ill due to an unidentified fever but only 68 of them died since late April, an extremely low fatality rate if the illness is COVID-19 as suspected.
North Korea has limited testing capability for that many sick people, but some experts say it is also likely underreporting mortalities to protect Kim from political damage.
The official Korean Central News Agency said Kim attended the funeral Sunday of Hyon Chol Hae, a Korean People’s Army marshal who reportedly played a key role in grooming him as the country’s next leader before Kim’s father died in late 2011.
State media photos showed a bare-faced Kim carrying Hyon’s coffin with other men wearing masks before he threw earth to his grave at the national cemetery. They showed many soldiers clad in olive-green uniforms saluting while other officials dressed in dark suits stood at attention. KCNA said “a great many” soldiers and citizens earlier turned out along the streets to express their condolences when Hyon’s coffin was moved to the cemetery.
North Korea maintains a nationwide lockdown and other stringent rules to curb the virus outbreak. Region-to-region movement is banned, but key agricultural, economic and industrial activities were continuing in an apparent effort to minimize harm to the country’s already moribund economy.