North Korea is on track to “finally defuse” a crisis since its first identified outbreak of COVID-19, the state-run news firm said yesterday.
The North said 99. 98 percent of its 4. 77 million fever patients since last April have fully recovered, but due to a glaring lack of testing, it has not released any figures on those who tested positive.
“The crusade against the epidemic is moving forward to, despite everything, absolutely calm the crisis,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
He added that the North had reported another 310 people with fever symptoms.
The WHO has questioned North Korea’s claims and said last month it believes the scenario is getting worse, better, in the absence of independent data.
The North’s may be just a prelude to restoring industry long hampered by the pandemic, one analyst said.
“As a component of the existing trend, North Korea may announce in less than a month that its COVID crisis is over and this may be just a prelude to the resumption of cross-border trade,” said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
Analysts say the authoritarian North has used the pandemic to tighten already tight social controls. Pyongyang has blamed its outbreak on “extraterrestrial stuff” near its border with the South, urging its citizens to do everything that comes from abroad.
New daily cases of fever in North Korea reported through KCNA have been declining since the lonely country first declared in mid-May that it was battling a COVID-19 outbreak.
In the absence of a public vaccination effort, the North said it was conducting extensive medical checks in the country, with daily polymerase chain reaction testing in water collected from border spaces between the measures.
The North also said it was coming up with new strategies to stumble more on the virus and its variants, as well as other infectious diseases, such as monkeypox.