Kim said at a meeting of senior politicians that they prevented the new coronavirus from entering the country, which was largely closed.
“Despite the worldwide health crisis, we have thoroughly prevented the malignant virus from intermingling and maintained a stable anti-epidemic situation,” state news agency KCNA said on Friday.
However, Kim rebuked the authorities to complain, as the global health crisis has not yet disappeared.
“The hasty removal of anti-epidemic measures will result in an unimaginable and irrecoverable crisis,” according to the report. Said.
Images posted by the KCNA of the meeting showed that Kim was headed by dozens of officials who seemed not to practice social distance. None of them wore masks.
However, Pyongyang-based diplomatic sources said that everyone is wearing masks and applying some kind of social distance in the streets. Life in the capital of North Korea has mostly returned to normal, and construction sites, shops and hotels are now open. One of the sources said that there schools were reopened in June.
Sources said North Korean officials were confident that they were controlling the virus, at least in Pyongyang, but one source said it had not heard of anyone tested.
The meeting was that Kim was open to the public for the first time in weeks. The young North Korean leader has kept a very busy schedule full of public events in the past years, but has maintained a surprisingly low profile over the past three months.
More than 10.8 million people on the planet snatched the new coronavirus, and more than half a million people died due to the virus. Every country in East Asia has reported at least one Covid-19 case, with the exception of North Korea.
Public health experts say the virus is unlikely to do this in a country way. One of the most likely scenarios is that the virus may have entered the northern border with China, where smuggling is common. Coronavirus clusters were detected in northeastern China, in Jilin province in May.
Experts believe that North Korea will be particularly vulnerable to the Covid-19 outbreak because of its poor health infrastructure.
However, the country is also in a good position to prevent the virus from penetrating its borders. North Korea stopped allowing people to enter when the outbreak first occurred, and people in the country cannot enjoy the freedom to act as they wish. Opponents say average North Koreans are not allowed to travel away from home without government approval.
The World Health Organization representative in North Korea told NK News that 922 people in the country were tested for the virus and all of them tested negative. North Korea’s population is probably around 25 million, but an exact number is uncertain because Pyongyang does not make demographic information public.
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