Leading the Emergency Anti-epidemic War to Victory

Although the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had remained safe for two years and three months, its epidemic prevention barrier was broken and coronavirus made inroads into its territory. Having immediately put the highest-level emergency anti-epidemic system in place on May 12 and eradicated the virus, it held the National Meeting to Review Emergency Anti-epidemic Work on August 10 and downgraded the anti-epidemic emergency to that of an intensified and reinforced normal epidemic prevention system.

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un said at the meeting: The arduous war against the epidemic was over, and today we were proclaiming victory; the goal of our struggle against the epidemic, which aimed at turning our territory into a clean one free from the virus in the shortest possible time, had been attained.

It is thanks to the wise leadership of the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un that the DPRK managed in a stable manner the highest-level emergency anti-epidemic situation created by the entrance of the malignant virus at a time when the rest of the world was still suffering from a crisis due to the malignant disease.

In retrospect, Kim Jong Un, being worried about the safety of people, convened a series of important meetings of the Workers’ Party of Korea even at night or early in the morning, at which he ordered to raise the state epidemic prevention work to the highest-level emergency anti-epidemic system and indicated the orientation and ways for defusing the epidemic crisis and laying a strong foundation for protecting the lives and safety of the people in a sustained way.

And he visited the State Emergency Epidemic Prevention Headquarters and said that the work of epidemiological sector had been merely data collecting and commanding so far, but from then on, the preventive and medical institutions should launch a medical treatment campaign. Then he galvanized the officials in the public health sector and took a measure of immediately releasing the medicines reserved in anticipation of emergency.

He also ensured that the Central Military Commission of the WPK issued a special order to dispatch the powerful force in the medical sector of the Korean People’s Army so as to immediately stabilize the supply of medicines in the capital city of Pyongyang.

He was so distressed about the sufferings of people that he donated his household medicines to be offered to the families in South Hwanghae Province sick with the epidemic. He visited at night the pharmacies which might be contaminated with the epidemic and took immediate emergency measures.

In the arduous days which were reminiscent of a war, he went over 1 772 documents of 22 956 pages related with the anti-epidemic work even though he was very busy leading overall state affairs.

Thanks to his outstanding leadership and paternal love for the people, the anti-epidemic effort in the DPRK was turned into a campaign of overcoming the malignant disease not on the strength of any material and technical means, but by dint of its advantageous political system, the united strength of the Party and the people and the communist virtue of helping and leading each other forward in difficult times.

During the period of the highest-level emergency anti-epidemic campaign, strong measures were adopted to defuse the epidemic crisis and restore complete stability through all-people resistance and all-people alliance, and the people accepted the anti-epidemic measures of the Party and the state unconditionally.

The trait of voluntarily observing the anti-epidemic regulations and order was established among the people and the atmosphere of anti-epidemic work prevailed throughout society.

More than 71 200 public health workers and over 1 148 000 hygiene activists were mobilized every day across the country to screen and test the entire population and to identify and treat fever cases, while thousands of former public health workers volunteered for this effort.

In particular, the KPA medics who were deployed to over 670 pharmacies in the capital city on the special order of the WPK’s Central Military Commission supplied medicines to residents day and night and visited and treated serious cases with all sincerity.

As a result, the daily number of fever cases, which had exceeded over 390 000 in the early days when the highest-level emergency anti-epidemic system was put in place, decreased to zero and the crisis was curbed in the shortest possible time. The fatality rate was a record low of 0.0016 percent.

Thanks to the self-sacrificing devotion and energetic leadership of Kim Jong Un, the DPRK could quench the public health crisis in over 100 days since COVID-19 entered its territory, and over 80 days since it moved to the highest anti-epidemic emergency level. This was a miracle worthy of note in the history of world public health circles.

2022-09-06