(SEOUL) North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has blasted officials’ negligence and laziness that have worsened the country’s coronavirus outbreak, state media reported on Wednesday, with the number of cases now exceeding 1.7 million .
Posted at 6:55 a.m.
Chairing a Party meeting on Tuesday, the leader said there was “a lack of maturity in the state’s ability to deal with the crisis” and criticized “the non-positive attitude, softness and inactivity of senior state officials,” the official KCNA news agency reported.
North Korea recorded 232,880 new cases of “fever” on Tuesday evening, bringing the total toll to 1.72 million cases and 62 deaths, according to the same source.
At the meeting on Tuesday, Kim Jong-un promised to “wake up the whole Party like an active volcano” to counter the spread of the virus.
Since the country announced its first case of COVID-19 last Thursday, the leader has taken personal control of the fight against the epidemic, which he says is causing “great upheaval” in the country.
He notably ordered a national confinement, his population not being vaccinated, and deployed the army to help fight against the coronavirus.
The army “has urgently deployed its powerful forces to all pharmacies in Pyongyang city and started providing medicine as part of a 24-hour service”, KCNA said.
However, the WHO on Tuesday expressed concern about the havoc Omicron can wreak on North Korea’s unvaccinated population and reiterated its offer of assistance ranging from vaccines to medical equipment.
For now, the Pyongyang authorities do not seem to have responded to these calls.
North Korea’s healthcare system was ranked 193and out of 195 countries by a study by the American University Johns Hopkins last year.
The country’s hospitals are notoriously under-equipped, with few intensive care units.
According to experts, the country has no treatment for COVID-19 and lacks the capacity to massively test its population.