প্রকাশ: 15/05/2022
North Korea has confirmed 15 more deaths and hundreds of
thousands of additional patients with fevers as it mobilizes more than a
million health and other workers to try to suppress the country’s first
COVID-19 outbreak, state media reported Sunday.
After maintaining a widely disputed claim to be
coronavirus-free for more than two years, North Korea announced Thursday that
it had found its first COVID-19 patients since the pandemic began.
It has said a fever has spread across the country
“explosively” since late April but hasn’t disclosed exactly how many COVID-19
cases it has found. Some experts say North Korea lacks the diagnostic kits
needed to test a large number of suspected COVID-19 patients.
The additional deaths reported Sunday took the country’s
reported fever-related fatalities to 42. The official Korean Central News
Agency also reported that another 296,180 people with fevers had been tallied,
taking the reported total to 820,620.
The outbreak has triggered concern about a humanitarian
crisis in North Korea because most of the country’s 26 million people are
believed to be unvaccinated against the coronavirus and its public health care
system has been in shambles for decades. Some experts say North Korea might
suffer huge fatalities if it doesn’t immediately receive outside shipments of
vaccines, medicines and other medical supplies.
“Without COVID-19 test kits, North Korea is resorting to
body temperature checks to guess at infections. But with such a very inferior
and inaccurate method of examination, it’s impossible to find asymptomatic
virus carriers and control viral surges,” said analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at
South Korea’s Sejong Institute.
“As North Korea's (suspected) COVID-19 infections are
explosively increasing, its death toll is expected to continue to rise,"
Cheong added.
Since Thursday, North Korea has imposed a nationwide
lockdown to fight the virus. That could further strain the country’s fragile
economy, which has suffered in recent years due to sharply reduced external
trade caused by pandemic-related border shutdowns, punishing U.N. economic
sanctions over its nuclear program and its own mismanagement, observers say.
During a meeting on the outbreak Saturday, North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un described the outbreak as a historically “great upheaval”
and called for unity between the government and people to stabilize the
outbreak as quickly as possible.
KCNA said Sunday that more than 1.3 million people have been
engaged in works to examine and treat sick people and raise public awareness of
hygiene. It said everyone with fevers and others with abnormal symptoms was
being put in quarantine and treated. KCNA said the elevated pandemic response
includes the establishment of more quarantine facilities, the urgent
transportation of medical supplies to hospitals and increased disinfection
efforts.
“All provinces, cities and counties of the country have been
totally locked down and working units, production units and residential units
closed from each other since the morning of May 12 and strict and intensive
examination of all the people is being conducted,” KCNA said.
Of those with symptoms, 496,030 have recovered, while as of
Saturday 324,4550 were still receiving treatment, KCNA reported, citing the
country’s emergency epidemic prevention center.
State media reports said Kim and other senior North Korean
officials are donating their private reserve medicines to support the country’s
anti-pandemic fight. During Saturday’s meeting, Kim expressed optimism that the
country could bring the outbreak under control, saying most transmissions are
occurring within communities that are isolated from one another and not
spreading from region to region.
Despite the outbreak, Kim has ordered officials to go ahead
with planned economic, construction and other state projects, a suggestion that
authorities aren’t requiring people to confine themselves at home. Hours after
it admitted its virus outbreak Thursday, North Korea even fired ballistic
missiles toward the sea in a continuation of its recent streak of weapons tests.
KCNA said that Kim, accompanied by top deputies, visited a
mourning station Saturday set up for senior official Yang Hyong Sop, who died a
day earlier, to express his condolences and meet bereaved relatives. A separate
KCNA dispatch said Sunday that officials and laborers in the northeast were
launching initiatives to prevent an expected spring drought from damaging crop
yields and quality.
South Korea and China have offered to send vaccines, medical
supplies and other aid shipments to North Korea, but Pyongyang hasn’t publicly
responded to the overtures. North Korea previously rebuffed millions of doses
of vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program amid
speculation that it worried about possible side effects of vaccines or
international monitoring requirements attached to those shots.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday the
United States supported international aid efforts but doesn’t plan to share its
vaccine supplies with the North. The North Korean virus outbreak could still be
a major topic of discussion when President Joe Biden visits Seoul later this
week for a summit with newly inaugurated South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
South Korea’s former spy chief Park Jie-won wrote on
Facebook on Friday that he had proposed in May 2021 as the then-director of the
National Intelligence Service that Washington send 60 million doses of vaccines
to North Korea as humanitarian aid via COVAX. He said there were later talks in
the U.N. and the Vatican about shipping 60 million doses to North Korea as
well, but such aid was never realized as no formal offers were made to North
Korea.
Park said he hopes North Korea would accept Yoon’s aid
offers quickly though he said he doubts whether the North would do so.
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