North Korea is on the path to "finally defuse" a crisis stemming from its first acknowledged outbreak of COVID-19, the state news agency said Monday, while Asian neighbors battle a fresh wave of infections driven by omicron subvariants.

The North says 99.98% of its 4.77 million fever patients since late April have fully recovered, but due to an apparent lack of testing, it has not released any figures of those that proved positive.

"The anti-epidemic campaign is improved to finally defuse the crisis completely," the Korean Central News Agency said. It added that the North had reported 310 more people with fever symptoms.