Hardly a month after admitting the existence of COVID-19 within its borders, North Korea is reportedly preparing to declare victory over the pandemic and has even gone as far as suspending coronavirus-related imports from China.
According to its state media, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), daily new cases of fever reported in the country have been declining since Pyongyang first acknowledged in mid-May that it was fighting a COVID-19 outbreak. However, the secretive country is yet to reveal how many of those cases have tested positive for the coronavirus.
In its latest health report, KCNA quoted the state emergency epidemic prevention headquarters, stating that more than 17,250 cases of fever were recorded, with over 19,520 recoveries between June 19 and June 20. The report added that between late April and June 20, the total number of fever cases has crossed 4,657,190, of which more than 99.37% have recovered and at least 0.63% are under medical treatment.
According to state media, North Korea has successfully prevented the mass deaths that many experts expected in a nation with one of the world’s weakest health care systems, little or no access to vaccines, and what outsiders see as a long record of ignoring the suffering of its people.
Moreover, this probable decline in infections is also reflected in the country’s trade figures over the past year. Trade data released by Chinese customs on Monday showed that in May, the rogue nation abruptly stopped importing COVID-19 prevention and control products from China, including face masks, thermometers, rubber gloves, ventilators, or vaccines despite having previously having bought face masks and ventilators from Beijing.
North Korea still looks unlikely to reopen its borders to tourism or DPRK nationals stranded abroad, experts say.
— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) June 20, 2022
One tourism industry insider told NK News that it could take until at least 2024 before foreigners will be allowed enter the country.https://t.co/BOKyPZrJTW
According to China’s General Administration of Customs, Pyongyang’s trade volume with Beijing sharply fell from $102.34 million in April, to $20.31 million in May. Data shows that North Korea’s exports to China totalled $5.8 million in May, up 36.5% from $4.25 million in April, but imports during the same period dropped by 85.2% to $14.51 million.
In comparison, North Korea imported more than 10.6 million masks, nearly 95,000 thermometers, as well as 1,000 non-invasive ventilators from China between January and April. Railroad freight traffic between the two countries was halted in August 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China and only resumed in January this year. With the resumption, Pyongyang’s trade volume with Beijing in the first quarter increased ten-fold from the last year. However, it was suspended once again in late April due to tighter border controls put in place to stop an outbreak of COVID-19 in China’s border city of Dandong.
Despite the apparent slowdown in infections, the country continues to enforce “intensified” preventive measures. In a press release by Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Korea’s central emergency epidemic prevention sector has “launched a campaign for treating patients by dispatching rapid collective diagnosis teams of the national hygienic and anti-epidemic center to the areas in South Hwanghae Province, where an acute enteric epidemic occurred, and making an epidemiological survey of inhabitants and checking up persons with fever.”
Moreover, the paper reported that the North Korean Ministry of Public Health has been taking measures “for rapidly checking the spread of the epidemic in cooperation with medical workers in relevant areas while ensuring the medicine supply.”
In addition, in spite of the slowdown in trade relations with China, the country put out a press release this morning hailing “the fraternal feelings” between the two countries, which it said reflect “the most genuine comradeship and kinship.”