North Korea's suspected COVID-19 caseload nears 2 million

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Thursday reported 262,270 more cases of people with suspected symptoms of COVID-19 as its pandemic caseload neared 2 million — a week after the country acknowledged the outbreak and scrambled to slow the rate of infections despite a lack of health care resources.

The country is also trying to prevent its fragile economy from deteriorating, but the outbreak could be worse than officially reported because of scarce resources for virus testing and the possibility that North Korea could be deliberately underreporting deaths to soften the political impact on authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korea's anti-virus headquarters reported a single death in the 24 hours to 6 p.m. Wednesday to bring its death toll to 63, which experts have said is abnormally small compared to the suspected number of infections.

The official Korean Central News Agency reported that more than 1.98 million people have become sick with feverish symptoms since late April, which are mostly believed to be coronavirus omicron variant infections, although the country has only confirmed a small number of infection cases because of the scarcity of tests. At least 740,160 people are in quarantine, the news agency reported.

After maintaining a dubious claim that it had kept the virus out of the country for two and a half years, North Korea acknowledged its first COVID-19 infections last Thursday, saying that tests from an unspecified number of people in capital Pyongyang showed they were infected with the omicron variant.

Kim has called the outbreak a “great upheaval” and has imposed what the country described as maximum preventive measures that strictly restricted the movement of people and supplies between cities and regions.

He mobilized more than 1 million...