North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared victory over COVID-19 and ordered a relaxation of preventive measures just three months after admitting to an outbreak, claiming that the East Asian country’s widely disputed success would be recognized as a global health miracle.
Kim Yo Jong, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), had a fever and blamed the country’s outbreak on leaflets flown across the border from South Korea, warning of deadly retaliation.
Some experts believe Pyongyang manipulated the scale of the outbreak in order to keep Kim in absolute control of the country despite mounting economic difficulties. They believe his victory speech signals his intention to shift his focus, but they are concerned that his sister’s remarks foreshadow a provocation.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, issued a statement expressing deep regret over the North’s “extremely disrespectful and threatening comments” about the source of its infection.
Pyongyang has reported about 4.8 million “fever cases” in its 26 million-person population since admitting to an Omicron outbreak in May, but only a fraction of them have been identified as Covid-19. According to the report, the outbreak has been slowing for weeks and has claimed only 74 lives.
“Since we began operating the maximum emergency anti-epidemic campaign (in May), daily fever cases that reached hundreds of thousands during the early days of the outbreak were reduced to below 90,000 a month later and continuously decreased, and not a single case of fever suspected to be linked to the evil virus has been reported since July 29,” Kim stated this in a speech on Wednesday.
“For a country that has yet to administer a single vaccine shot, our success in overcoming the spread of the illness in such a short period of time and recovering safety in public health and making our nation a clean virus-free zone again is an amazing miracle that would be recorded in the world’s history of public health,” he stated.
According to Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Kim’s declaring victory against COVID-19 suggests that he wants to move on to other priorities, such as boosting a broken and heavily sanctioned economy further harmed by pandemic border closures or conducting a nuclear test.
South Korean and US officials say the North may be preparing for its first nuclear test in five years, following a flurry of weapons tests this year, including the first demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missiles since 2017.
