No “fever” patient deaths have been reported by North Korean authorities in the past 24 hours, with 134,510 new cases reported. According to the authorities, the situation is gradually being brought under control, as they find a “steady” decrease, almost two weeks after officially announced the first outbreak of the new coronavirus in the isolated country.
Authorities see “success” in tackling the crisis: for a third consecutive day the potential cases remained below the 200,000 level. The official death toll remained unchanged, at 68 dead out of a total of 2.95 million infections. But those numbers are increasingly being challenged by experts, who point out that all they show is how difficult it remains to estimate the spread of the pandemic.
The outbreak of the crisis, announced on May 12, erupted concerns over the complete absence of vaccines and drugs against COVID-19, inadequate medical infrastructure and the potential food crisis that could cause the state of 25 million inhabitants. THE North Korea keeps the borders closed, while there is no way to verify official numbers.
As it obviously does not have a test, Pyongyang has not announced the number of laboratory-confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2, nor whether the deaths it is talking about were actually due to COVID-19.
In the midst of “insufficient examinations, disincentives at the local level of public administration to report outbreaks, cases, deaths, and whatever political motives the top leadership has,” what emerges “are statistics with absolutely no meaning,” summed up Christopher Green, an expert on North Korea at Leiden University in the Netherlands via Twitter.
The official KCNA news agency reported yesterday that drug factories are “accelerating production”, but did not specify which drugs, as reported by Reuters and the Athens News Agency. At the same time, Pyongyang continues to face with cold ice the offers of South Korea and the United States to help it deal with the first officially confirmed outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Statistically, North Korea’s announcements ‘do not fit international standards and appear to be for domestic consumption,'” said Moon Jin-soo, an assistant professor at Seoul National Medical School. Pyongyang figures are 0.002%, while in South Korea it is at 0.13% at the moment despite being fully immunized and receiving booster doses of the majority of the population (almost 87% and almost 64% respectively).
Source: News Beast
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