North Korea on Thursday reported 262,270 more suspected COVID-19 cases as its pandemic caseload neared 2 million - a week after the country acknowledged the outbreak and scrambled to slow infections in its unvaccinated population.
The country is also trying to prevent its fragile economy from deteriorating further, but the outbreak could be worse than officially reported since the country lacks virus tests and other health care resources and may be underreporting deaths to soften the political impact on authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's outbreak comes amid a provocative streak of weapons demonstrations, including its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile in nearly five years in March. Experts don't believe the COVID-19 outbreak will slow Kim's brinkmanship aimed at pressuring the United States to accept the idea of the North as a nuclear power and negotiating economic and security concessions from a position of strength.
Workers were mobilized to find people with suspected COVID-19 symptoms who were then sent to quarantine - the main method of curbing the outbreak since North Korea is short of medical supplies and intensive care units that lowered COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in other nations. North Korea also must urgently work to protect its crops from a drought that hit during the crucial rice-planting season - a worrisome development in a country that has long suffered from food insecurity. State media also said that Kim's trophy construction projects, including the building of 10,000 new houses in the town of Hwasong, are being “propelled as scheduled.”
Kee Park, a global health specialist at Harvard Medical School who has worked on health care projects in North Korea, said the country's number of new cases should start to slow because of the strengthened preventive measures. Other experts say providing a small number of vaccines for high-risk groups such as the elderly would prevent deaths, though mass vaccinations would be impossible at this stage for the population of 26 million.
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