Health authorities in North Korea announced on Monday 392,920 new positive cases of covid-19 in 24 hours, with the record of eight deaths. Two and a half years after the start of the pandemic, during which the North Korean government guaranteed that had no record of a caseacknowledged Pyongyang on Friday, the appearance of an outbreak of the disease May 12.
The state of “maximum alert” was decreed on Saturday without the health services being able to stop the spread of the virus in a mostly unvaccinated population. According to Amnesty International, the Kim Jong-un regime in 2021 refused the World Health Organization (WHO) offer of vaccines from AstraZeneca and Sinovac and also twice refused to accept vaccines. vaccines offered by Russia.
Now, the SARS-CoV-2 virus appears to be spreading at high speed, with a cumulative total of 1,213,550 positive cases since Thursday.
‘Fever’ is spreading across the country, North Korean leader said at Saturday’s emergency meeting in which it was decided to put the country on high alert, according to the North’s leader -Korean. site NK News. However, since this spread is not uniform across all regions, Kim Jong-un demanded that containment and quarantine measures be strictly enforced.
During the meeting, it was also mentioned that the country has been in a state of “great unrest” since at the end of April “symptoms of fever” began to be recorded in a large number of people. According to media North Korean state-owned enterprises, since then there have been 50 deaths.
“There is no evidence that North Korea has access to enough vaccines to protect its population from Covid-19,” said Boram Jang, Far East researcher at Amnesty International. Even so, Pyongyang has so far preferred to reject offers because the WHO’s Covax program requires “transparent distribution and tracking”.
“With the first official news of a covid-19 epidemic in the country, continuing on this path could cost many lives and would be an inconceivable negligence in the defense of the right to health”, estimates the same researcher. “It is vital that the government acts now to protect the right to health of one of the populations in the world that has the least access to vaccines, without discrimination and ensuring a transparent and scrutiny of the vaccine distribution plan. public.”
The regime has established “maximum” restriction measures to try to contain the outbreak of the Ómicron variant, detected in Pyongyang. “Thanks to the high political consciousness of the people, the country will surely overcome the emergency,” said Kim Jong-un.
South Korea, China and Russia have already offered to help.
The South Korean government is “actively considering the proposal to hold a working meeting with North Korea” this week, a government official, who requested anonymity, told Yonhap News Agency. The South Korean Unification Ministry confirmed that it had received a meeting request from Pyongyang and assured that it would respond “as soon as possible” to provide “concrete assistance” to the North Koreans.
Moscow said on Friday it was ready to send help if requested, the Interfax news agency reported, but North Korea had yet to request any help.