At the height of the covid outbreak, a large number of North Koreans, including leader Kim Jong Un, attended the funeral of a senior regime official. Hyon Chol Hae was a marshal in the Korean People's Army who played a key role in grooming the president as the country's next leader before Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, died in late 2011.
It was one of the largest state funerals in the country since his father's death. A bare-faced Kim Jong Un loaded Hyon's coffin with other senior officials wearing face masks before dumping dirt on his grave with their bare hands at the national cemetery.
Since admitting earlier this month to an outbreak of the highly contagious omicron variant, North Korea has only declared how many people have a fever daily and identified only a fraction of the cases as Covid-19. Its state media said Monday that 2.8 million people have fallen ill due to an unidentified high fever, but only 68 of them have died since the end of April, an extremely low death rate given suspicions that the disease is Covid-19. 19.
North Korea has limited screening capacity for so many infections, but some experts say it is also likely to underreport deaths to protect Kim from political harm.
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