North Korea’s recent decision to roll back most masking and social distancing requirements is likely part of the regime’s efforts to signal it is in control of its outbreak to both its own people and China, experts told NK News.

DPRK state media reported on the easing of COVID-19 restrictions on Sunday, except in border areas, after leader Kim Jong Un claimed last week that the country has “eradicated” the virus.

Peter Ward, an expert on the North Korean economy and NK Pro contributor, suggested Pyongyang seeks to “make the government look competent” in the eyes of its people.

But he said he “struggles to see what any of this really means” for the future of the country’s border controls, unless there are “serious changes” to how the country handles trade.

Throughout the pandemic, Pyongyang has attempted to signal it is in control of the virus situation and that there is nothing to worry about so long as citizens follow the government’s policies.

Domestic assurances may be the thrust of North Korea’s COVID victory lap, Christopher Green of Leiden University said, but Pyongyang is also well aware of how its messaging lands abroad.

“Pyongyang’s lifting of measures might partly be a response to public dissatisfaction. But that is not the entire explanation,” Green told NK News. ” I think it is at least partly a communications strategy to indicate that North Korea has the outbreak under control, in order to assure the Chinese that it can restart overland trade.” 

On Tuesday, NK Pro analysis of satellite imagery revealed that all goods appear to have cleared quarantine at North Korea’s large-scale import disinfection complex near the Chinese border. The development came after leader Kim Jong Un called for “reexamining” border controls, suggesting that Pyongyang eyes a trade resumption with China.

Chinese cities on the border with North Korea have been extremely fearful of COVID-19 spilling over from across the border. In late May, Dandong announced a cash reward system for those reporting border smuggling to the police because COVID-19 “continues to spread and mutate.”

North Korea may thus have an economic incentive to fudge the numbers.

“People can get reinfected, so it’s hard to see how the virus is likely to have disappeared altogether,” Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at the Canberra Hospital and professor at Australian National University, told NK News. 

Earlier this month, state media claimed that authorities conducted polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests on 100,000 patients with “COVID-like” symptoms from July 28 to Aug. 7 but found no cases, a result Collignon said was “hard to believe.”

He added that the country’s “ death figures are unbelievable.” Citing North Korea’s unvaccinated population, Collignon said he would suspect some 240,000 dead — “about at least 1%” — if COVID-19 ripped through all 24 million or so North Koreans. 

Instead, out of just 4.7 million “fever cases” state media has reported, the official death toll in the country stands at 74 people.

North Korea has used “fever” as a stand-in for COVID-19, likely because it lacks sufficient testing infrastructure. But experts previously told NK News that the DPRK’s “crude” approach to identifying COVID-19 could lead to continued uncertainty about true case counts and the handling of the virus. 

And at the same time, the country’s state media has widely covered the outbreak of monkeypox since last month, showing how North Korea could find further justification to hunker down in the latest declaration of a global emergency and indicating the country will likely remain closed off for visitors in the near future.

Updated at 7:10 a.m. KST to clarify significance of satellite imagery analysis on border disinfection complex.

Edited by Arius Derr