Army in North Korea Joins the Battle Against Covid

Kim Jong-un has criticised North Korea’s pandemic response and ordered the army to help distribute medicine, state media said Monday, as the country said 50 people had died since first reporting an outbreak of Covid-19.

More than one million people have been sickened by what Pyongyang is referring to as “fever”, state media said, despite Kim ordering nationwide lockdowns in a bid to slow the spread of disease through the unvaccinated population.

After two years denying North Korea had any cases of Covid-19, last week officials confirmed that there had been a Covid outbreak in the country.

In a sign of how serious the situation may be, Kim “strongly criticised” healthcare officials over their response to epidemic prevention – specifically a failure to keep pharmacies open 24/7 to distribute medicine.

He ordered the army to get to work “on immediately stabilising the supply of medicines in Pyongyang”, the capital, where Omicron was detected last week in North Korea’s first official reported cases of Covid-19.