Covid-19: North Korea prides itself on having “successfully overcome” the epidemic

Lhe news was on the front page of Rodong Sinmun, the official news outlet of North Korea’s ruling party, before being picked up by other state media in the country. Relayed by International mail, Sunday May 22, a somewhat presumptuous editorial certifies that the health crisis has been brought under control thanks to the drastic containment policy put in place. The latter would have made it possible “to tame the virus and achieve a stable situation”. “After setting the world record for the longest time without registering a single case (of Covid-19) during the pandemic, we suppressed and controlled the spread of the virus for good in a flash of time, which proves a thousand times that our Party’s epidemic policy is the right one,” Rodong Sinmun boasts.

By “successfully overcoming” the coronavirus pandemic, North Korea would have managed to do what no other country has yet succeeded. Since the end of April, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has acknowledged that more than 2.4 million of the 25 million North Koreans have suffered… from fever. According to official figures, 67 would have died. Since then, the number of cases of fever has diminished very rapidly.

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Falsified data?

However, the figures conveyed by the Korean authorities are perplexing at the international level. Pyongyang is suspected of minimizing the number of deaths, to better highlight the effectiveness of its measures and try to impress the leaders of other countries. As soon as the coronavirus arrived, the regime relentlessly refused offers of outside help and did not receive vaccines.

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