🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
North Korea has disclosed more than 230,000 new "fever" cases, widely suspected to be linked to an explosive COVID outbreak, as its leader, Kim Jong Un, refuses outside help despite acknowledging a "severe health crisis" in the country.
Senior officials in the ruling Workers' Party are facing the prospect of discipline, according to the minutes of a recent Politburo meeting chaired by Kim, who brandished words including "immaturity" and "slackness," while criticizing "evils and defects" in the government's response to what observers fear could become a humanitarian disaster.
Pyongyang reported 232,880 new "persons with fever" in the 24 hours up to 6 p.m. local time on May 17, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Wednesday. The total number of fever patients in the past three weeks reached 1,715,950, but more than a million have recovered, the news service said.
North Korea's insufficient testing capacity means it's not likely to determine the true scale of its first acknowledged outbreak of the pandemic. For more than two years, it maintained a widely doubted claim that strict border controls had successfully kept out COVID—a point of personal pride for the 38-year-old supreme leader.
Pyongyang identified the strain of the virus as the highly transmissible Omicron variant. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed this week that North Korea was one of only two member states not to have begun a vaccination program, the other being Eritrea.
Outside experts believe state media is deliberately underreporting the real size of the COVID outbreak in order to avoid public unrest and a hit to Kim's regime stability. This has cast doubt not only on North Korea's fever count—one of the symptoms of the disease—but also its death toll, which KCNA said had risen to 62 as of Tuesday.
As COVID continues to spread throughout the country, where up to half of its 25 million people are thought to be malnourished, observers believe Kim could continue his frequent missile tests as a diversion. At home, meanwhile, the North Korean leader has also been taking aim at top party officials, who have been blamed for letting the virus in.
At a May 17 gathering of the party's Politburo, Kim blasted "immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis," and attributed current hardships to "the non-positive attitude, slackness and non-activity of state leading officials."
"He stressed the need to criticize and analyze in depth the evils and defects revealed in every sector," according to a summary carried by KCNA.
At a WHO press conference on Tuesday, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was "deeply concerned" by North Korea's outbreak and the risk of the virus having a serious impact on its unvaccinated and vulnerable population.
The United Nations agency said it had requested data and information from North Korea and has offered support in the form of testing kits, medication and vaccines. It received no response. Both Beijing and Seoul made similar offers this week, but neither reported any reply from Pyongyang.
When WHO-approved vaccines became widely available last year, Kim rejected the chance to begin inoculating North Koreans, opting instead to wait out the pandemic by shutting its borders.
Analysts believe Kim now faces a dilemma: take a hit to his personal legitimacy by accepting help from his neighbors or risk millions of lives by allowing the COVID outbreak to spiral out of control.
About the writer
John Feng is Newsweek's contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He ... Read more