Kim: Covid causing ‘great upheaval’

More than half a million people ill in North Korea

“The actual number of Covid cases could be higher than the fever figures due to many asymptomatic cases.”

Cheong Seong-chang | Sejong Institute

Leader Kim Jong Un says a Covid-19 outbreak is causing ‘great upheaval’ in North Korea, which announced 21 new “fever” deaths yesterday.

Two days after 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 Thursday that the highly contagious Omicron variant had been detected in the capital Pyongyang, with Kim ordering nationwide lockdowns.

First official admission

It was the government’s first official admission of Covid 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.

Growing cases

“The actual number of Covid 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 yesterday the “crisis” was causing “great upheaval”, as he oversaw a second Politburo meeting in three days.

“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 putting himself “front and centre” of the country’s Covid response, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. “The language he’s used suggests the situation in North Korea is going to get worse before it gets better,” he told AFP.