North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the neglect and laziness of public officials has exacerbated the Covid-19 outbreak in the country, with the total number of cases exceeding 1.7 million, official media reported on Wednesday.
The country announced its first case of coronavirus last week, and the outbreak caused by the omycron variant continues to grow after a two-year quarantine that put North Korea out of the pandemic.
Kim, who chaired a Politburo meeting, denounced the “immaturity of the state’s ability to face the crisis” and criticized the “negative attitude, neglect and lack of activity by senior government officials”, the official KCNA news agency reported.
According to the same agency, North Korea reported 232,880 new cases of “fever” Tuesday night, for a total of 1.72 million infections and 62 deaths.
The state media does not report how many cases and deaths are related to the coronavirus, but analysts point out that the country will have difficulty organizing large-scale tests.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Kim pledged to “wake up the entire party like an active volcano” to contain the virus.
The North Korean leader claimed responsibility for the national response to the outbreak and said the outbreak had caused “major upheaval across the country”.
Medicines donated by the Kim family were distributed in South Hwanghae province to highlight the president’s role in fighting the disease, according to media reports.
The official press said that about 3,000 military doctors have joined the “24-hour service system to deliver medicines.”
With poorly equipped hospitals, few intensive care units and a lack of Covid drugs or testing capacity, North Korea has one of the worst healthcare systems, experts say.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is “deeply concerned at the risk of a massive covid-19 spread in the country, especially as the population is not vaccinated and many people have comorbidities that expose them to serious illness and death,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s executive director.
source: Noticias
