North Korea lifted restrictions on movement in the capital Pyongyang after first admitting to a Covid outbreak weeks ago, according to Japanese media.
The country led by dictator Kim Jong-un, according to state media, also called the local coronavirus situation stable. North Korea faces a battle against an unprecedented wave of Covid since it declared a state of emergency and imposed a nationwide lockdown, heightening concerns around a lack of vaccines, medical supplies and food shortages.
On Sunday, the restrictions were reversed, according to Japanese news agency Kyodo, citing an unnamed Beijing source — a spokesman for South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean issues. , said he could not confirm the report as North Korean state media has so far not announced the decision.
Kyodo’s report comes shortly after Kim led a meeting of the country’s Politburo to discuss the review of anti-Covid restrictions, in which he said the situation of the virus outbreak was improving.
“The political committee assessed the coordination and enforcement of regulations and guidelines as effective and swift given the current stable anti-epidemic situation,” state media KCNA said on Sunday.
The statement is in line with a recent message from the agency that the outbreak is under control. According to the government, mortality has dropped dramatically, there is a trend towards stabilization of infections and progress in the diagnosis and treatment of patients thanks to the “altruistic efforts” of doctors.
The situation, if in fact real, given the difficulty in obtaining information in one of the most isolated countries in the world, would be a rapid reversal of a situation that, when it emerged, seemed serious. Days after the admission of cases of Covid, which the government calls “fever”, Kim harshly criticized the response to the health crisis and mobilized the army to act in the distribution of medicines. The dictatorship even spoke of a “serious national emergency”, with more than a million people affected by the disease.
North Korea officially reported 100,710 more cases of people with fever symptoms in the last 24 hours, a decrease from three weeks ago, when data indicated 390,000 people had fever. With one death counted on Sunday, the total number of deaths reached 70.
The country has not confirmed the number of people who have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, apparently due to a lack of supplies for carrying out tests. Experts say that the scale of the data released can be much greater and highlight the difficulty in knowing the real North Korean scenario.
