WHO ON N.KOREA'S COVID-19 SITUATION

[Anchor Lead]

The World Health Organization was rather pessimistic about the COVID-19 situation in North Korea, which stands in contrast to the regime’s claim that the disease is coming under control. The WHO also said that it had provided three shipments of vaccines to North Korea.

[Pkg]

Citing the country’s emergency disease control command, North Korea’s central news agency KCNA announced that roughly 96,600 COVID-19 new cases were reported today. The number stayed in the 90,000 range for the third consecutive day. The number of daily new cases in North Korea shot up from some 18,000 on May 12th to a record high of 392,900 on May 15th. But then it fell down to around 100,000 daily cases in the past few days... giving North Korea grounds to claim that disease transmission is now under control. North Korean authorities announced that since late April a rough total of 3,835,400 cases and 69 deaths were reported. That is a fatality rate of about 0.0002%. The extremely low fatality rate given the number of cases caused many people to distrust North Korea’s numbers and not take it at face value. The World Health Organization’s skepticism seems to have risen from similar context. Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, said that the COVID-19 situation in North Korea seems to be worsening, even though proper assessments are difficult due to a lack of accurate information about COVID transmission in the country. He also said that the WHO provided North Korea with COVID-19 vaccines over three separate occasions. It was imperative to suppress an outbreak given that 25 million North Koreans hadn’t been vaccinated. The WHO, therefore, is still providing the country with the vaccines. Meanwhile, the WHO is reportedly working together with China and South Korea to provide assistance to the North and is quite satisfied with the current status of cooperation.