The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) will allocate $900,000 to the World Health Organization (WHO) for work in helping North Korea respond to a potential outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, the organization’s website showed Wednesday.

“The main objective of this project is to provide timely life-saving health assistance in priority countries in order to contain the global outbreak of the COVID-19 virus,” the UN website said.

“This WHO project focuses on the 8 pillars of WHO’s Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan,” the website stated, referring to plans including “country-level coordination and monitoring,” “risk communication and community engagement,” and “surveillance, rapid response teams, and case investigation.”

The plan also aims to assist member states with “infection prevention and control,” “case management,” and “operational support.”

Funds will be used to focus on “countries with imported cases or that are at high risk of imported cases and have limited operational response capacity,” the website added.

North Korea officially claims to have no cases of the COVID-19 virus within its territory, and has effectively closed its borders and ended all in-bound and out-bound travel in an attempt to prevent an outbreak.

Despite this, the WHO earlier this week listed the DPRK as being under a “High Risk of Imported Cases” and named the country as one of the world’s least prepared for an outbreak.

Fund allocations made public this week were reportedly released on February 27, around the same time that multiple international organizations and NGOs won sanctions exemptions allowing them to ship coronavirus-related medical into the DPRK.

Some of that cargo is now reported to have reached North Korea.

Edited by Oliver Hotham