Coronavirus North Korea: Kim Jong-un orders the Army to help distribute medicines

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un strongly criticized his country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic coronavirus and ordered the army to help distribute medicine, the official press reported on Monday, after revealing that 50 people have died in its first outbreak of covid-19.

More than a million people have been infected with what Pyongyang calls a “fever”according to the state press, despite Kim ordered nationwide lockdowns to curb the spread of the disease among the population, which has not been vaccinated.

Kim “strongly criticized” health officials for what he considered a poor response to epidemic preventionaccording to the official KCNA news agency.

Leader ordered the military commission to act “to immediately stabilize the supply of medicines in the city of Pyongyang involving the powerful forces of the medical branch of the People’s Army,” KCNA reported.

The outbreak, which Kim said had caused “great disruption,” affects a country that It does not have anticovid vaccines, antiviral drugs or the ability to carry out massive tests.

According to KCNA, Kim reported Sunday that “orders have not been properly filled and medications have not been supplied to pharmacies.”

He criticized that the pharmacies did not comply with the order to operate for 24 hours.

State media reported that 50 people have died, 1,213,550 suffer from fever and at least 564,860 are under medical treatment.

Kim took the lead in North Korea’s health response, holding almost daily meetings of the emergency commission.

“When visiting a pharmacy, Kim Jong-un saw with his eyes the shortage of medicine in North Korea,” Cheong Seong-jan, a researcher at the Sejong Institute, told AFP. “The situation could have been worse than I expected.”

North Korea It has maintained a rigid lockdown against the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, although experts have said that with the presence of the omicron variant in the region, it would be a matter of time before covid-19 spreads through the country.