Coronavirus: Is North Korea getting ready to declare victory over Covid-19?
- Pyongyang only acknowledged that it had a coronavirus outbreak last month. Yet state media claims cases are already plummeting and says just 73 people have died
- South Korea’s government believes the North may soon declare that it has beaten the virus. Linked, of course, to leader Kim Jong-un’s strong and clever guidance
According to state media, North Korea has avoided the mass deaths many expected in a nation with one of the world’s worst healthcare systems, little or no access to vaccines, and what outsiders see as a long record of ignoring the suffering of its people.
Daily updates from official media make it appear inevitable that the nation will soon announce the complete defeat of a virus that has killed more than 6 million people around the world. According to the official tally, cases are plummeting, and, while 18 per cent of the nation of 26 million people reportedly have had symptoms that outsiders strongly suspect were from Covid-19, fewer than 100 are said to have died.
A victory lap, however, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Doing so, according to some experts, would deprive Kim of a useful tool to control the public and possibly open the government up to humiliation if cases continue.
“There are two sides to such a declaration,” said Moon Seong-mook, an analyst with the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy. “If North Korea says that Covid-19 has gone, it can emphasise that Kim Jong-un is a great leader who has overcome the pandemic. But in doing so, it can’t maintain the powerful restrictions that it uses to control its people in the name of containing Covid-19.”