No new fever cases in North Korea

North Korea reported no new fever cases on Saturday for the first time since its acknowledgement in mid-May of a Covid-19 outbreak in the isolated country, state-run media reported.

North Korea said earlier this month it was on a path to "finally defuse" its first publicly declared coronavirus crisis even as Asian neighbours experience a resurgence in infections driven by Omicron subvariants.

The official KCNA news agency said 99.99per cent of its 4.77 million fever patients since late April have fully recovered, but because of an apparent lack of testing, it has not released any figures on people who tested positive for the virus.

Infectious disease experts have cast doubts on North Korea's claims of progress, with the World Health Organization saying last month it believed the situation was getting worse, not better, amid an absence of independent data.

KCNA said a rapid mobile treatment force was still on high alert and efforts were under way to "detect and stamp out the epidemic" until the last patient is fully recovered. The state media said 204 fever patients were under treatment as of Friday.

North Korea's latest report on the death toll among fever patients stood at 74 as of July 5, but Shin Young-jeon, a professor at Hanyang University's medical school in Seoul, said such low fatalities figures were nearly "impossible."

"It could result from a combination of a lack of testing capacity, counting issues given the fact that old people have higher chances of dying from Covid-19 mostly from home, and political reasons that the leadership do not want to publicise a massive death toll," he wrote in an analysis released on Friday.

Army medics involved medicine supply distribution work in Pyongyang

Army medics involved medicine supply distribution work amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Pyongyang, North Korea May 22, 2022 in this photo released May 23, 2022 by the country's Korean Central News Agency. KCNA via REUTERS

Shin said there could have been up to 50,000 deaths, considering the number of fever cases, general fatality rates reported elsewhere, and potentially unreported cases.

Despite the zero-new-case claim, North Korea is likely to keep the strict social controls it has imposed in part using the pandemic as a pretext as long as the "maximum emergency epidemic prevention system" is in place.