While North Korea has declared victory over the COVID-19 pandemic within its borders, the Ministry of Public Health has instructed infectious disease hospitals in various regions to set up a system for managing public medical records about exposure to infectious diseases, Daily NK has learned.
“According to an order given by the Ministry of Public Health at the beginning of this month, infectious disease hospitals around the country are working to develop infectious disease charts for each family under the name of ‘health notebooks’ that can be managed by hospital administrators,” a source inside North Korea told Daily NK on Wednesday.
According to the source, the ministry intends to use these “health notebooks” to record not only a history of tuberculosis, hepatitis and other infectious diseases for each family member but also whether they were quarantined at home or in a government facility because of fever or other symptoms during the recent emergency that was declared over COVID-19.
North Korea had steadily maintained that it was free of COVID-19 until May 12, when it first acknowledged that the disease was spreading inside the country. After declaring an emergency to combat the disease, the government began publishing statistics in local media about people being treated for fever around the country.
However, those statistics have been criticized as being unreliable and unscientific both inside and outside the country.
The North Korean government has concluded that the lack of a system for recording and managing underlying conditions, infectious diseases, and the incidence of suspicious symptoms among the populace was to blame for the shortcomings of its initial response to the outbreak and the unscientific nature of its statistics, the source said. As such, the government is taking pains to stress the importance of setting up such a system.
“The Ministry of Public Health has announced that medical histories based on tests and checkups carried out during the pandemic response will be managed through family ‘health notebooks’ not only at infectious disease hospitals that are already in operation around the country but also at those that are currently under construction. The ministry plans to manage infectious diseases through scientific statistics based on the information in those notebooks,” the source said.
As a result, the source said, the ministry has asked pandemic response departments in both the central government and local governments to share the results of tests and checkups carried out around the country over the past 90 days so that infectious disease hospitals in each region can create the necessary medical records.
The ministry is reportedly advertising this program to public health organizations at all levels by claiming that a more professional and focused system of scientific management will improve public health and quality of life while laying a concrete and reliable foundation for comprehensive statistics and the initial national response to infectious diseases in the future.
In a related development, the North Korean government is currently building dedicated hospitals and facilities for quarantining confirmed and suspected patients and those who come into contact with them in line with epidemiological needs as part of the government’s five-year plan. That project has its legal basis in the Emergency Anti-epidemic Law, which was adopted as Ordinance No. 369 by the standing committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly in August 2020.
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