Clear cell output in iPython Jupyter notebook executed in VS Code using Python extension

Is there a way to clear the cell output during runtime in an Jupyter notebook executed in VS Code using the new Python extension (which supports running Jupyter notebooks in VS Code)?

Ususally I use IPython.display.clear_output() to acomplish that when executing Jupyter notebooks in a web browser, for instance to get a progress bar for long data imports, something along those lines. VS Code for some reason seems to ignore this, which results in a VERY long cell output potentially crashing the kernel during runtime.

Edit (a small example):

from IPython.display import display, Markdown, HTML, clear_output
from time import sleep

def progress(cur, tot):
    clear_output(True)
    display(
       HTML(
        '''
            <div style="float:left; margin-right:5px;">
                <div style="font-weight:bold;">Dataset:</div>
            </div>
            <div style="float:left; margin-right:5px; text-align:left;">
                <div>{:d} / {:d}</div>
            </div>
        '''.format(cur, tot)
        ),
        HTML('<progress value=\"{:d}\" max=\"{:d}\" style=\"width:100%; height:1.5em;\"></progress>'.format(cur, tot))
    )

for i in range(10):
    progress(i, 10)
    sleep(0.2)

clear_output()
display(Markdown('Done!'))