SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said on Tuesday there were no new deaths among fever patients in the country, the first time since it first reported a coronavirus outbreak nearly two weeks ago, adding that it was seeing a downward trend in pandemic-related cases.
North Korea declared on May 12 that the virus wave has fueled concerns over a lack of vaccine, inadequate medical infrastructure and a potential food crisis in the country of 25 million.
There was no new fever death reported as of Monday evening despite adding 134,510 new patients, despite the North saying it was reporting successes in stemming the spread of the disease.
The daily figure fell below 200,000 for the third consecutive day, and the first time for the North to report no new deaths since announcing the number of daily fever patients, according to the official KCNA news agency.
North Korea has not confirmed the total number of people testing positive for the coronaviruses, instead reporting a number with fever symptoms, despite a lack of testing supplies.
The death toll rose to 2.95 million since April, and the total number of such cases rose to 68, according to KCNA.
After the maximum emergency epidemic prevention system was activated, the nationwide morbidity and mortality rates have decreased and the number of recovered persons has gone up, resulting in a curbing and controlling the spread of the pandemic disease and maintaining the clearly stable situation, KCNA said.
Many analysts doubt the credibility of the figures, saying that they only show how hard it is to assess the actual scale of the coronavirus wave in the isolated country.
Christopher Green, a Korea specialist at Leiden University, wrote on Twitter that we have stats that are essentially nonsense because of a mix of inadequate testing, disincentives at lower administrative levels to report serious outbreaks, cases, deaths, and whatever political motivations the top echelons may harbor.
North Korea has said authorities were distributing food and medicine across the country, with military medics deployed to help distribute drugs and conduct health exams.
The KCNA said that North Korea was expanding the production of essential medicine supplies, but it did not elaborate on what types were being produced.
South Korea and the United States have proposed to help North Korea fight the Pandemic, including with vaccines, but Pyongyang has not responded to the offer.
The daily announcement is hardly comparable to international standards and appears more at the domestic audience, according to Moon Jin-soo, associate professor at Seoul National University College of Medicine, referring to the North's reported fatality rate of 0.002 percent.
South Korea's Covid 19 fatality rate was 0.13 percent as of Tuesday.
South Korea's spy agency earlier told lawmakers that the daily figure announced by North Korea appears to include non-Covid 19 patients, as a number of waterborne diseases were already widespread in the country before it announced the coronavirus outbreak.