As established before, Rouhani can’t stop lying and contradicting his own administration officials. Today, he claimed the treatment for all COVID-19 patients is free of charge in Iran. While this is not the first time he’s claimed that, but after the last time, many officials have talked about the heavy cost of COVID-19 treatments on families and healthcare system. According to officials at “Salamat Insurance”, nationwide government network, treatment could cost anywhere between 700,000 – 80,000,000 Toman for a patient. If he is insured by Salamat, he’s only responsible for 10% of the cost which is still not “free”. Head of Public Relations Office at Ministry of Health, Kianoush Jahanpur, had said 17-19,000,000 is the cost for each patient admitted at wards and this is “several folds” if admitted at ICU!
While on this topic, Ministry of Health officials have announced the cost of each COVID-19 test to be between about 80,000-150,000 Toman depending on if the lab is owned by the government or private sector! However, local reports show each customer is being charged between 450,000-1,000,000 Toman! The government cannot even control its own hospitals or labs to follow a simple price sheet, or maybe what they say on TV and to reporters is just to fool the people, or maybe it’s all propaganda for their imaginary “enemies” in “foreign lands”!
Moharram remains the top concern for many experts and they keep reminding people to remain at home and not attend any gatherings without naming Moharram! However, religious goons don’t leave people alone, not even the sick! There was in the news that “Basij Clerics” have decided to attend at the bedside of COVID-19 patients orating and mourning “Imam Hossein” in Moharram so he would heal them! As if they hadn’t done this before and hadn’t cause faster spread of the virus outside hospitals!
In the meantime, Sima Sadat Lari appeared in front of cameras like every other day and announced the same 26 provinces in red (15) and alarming (11) status. She also announced 2,444 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 153 deaths in the past 24 hours. While she and other officials are so happy about the decline in cases and deaths, even according to their undercounted and widely discredited stats, graphs show a constant increase in the number of active cases during the past week.
It’s also worth noting, that since the official announcement of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Iran, Feb 19, Islamic Republic officials have only performed 2,939,840 total tests with average of 11% positivity rate throughout the 6 months! If we consider there has been no repeated test for one person, that means only 3.55% of the population have been tested! That would mean more when we take into account all local reports about full hospitals, and many people who don’t even go to the hospitals because they can’t afford it, and realize how accurate the daily stats provided by Ministry of Health really is! Despite all that, graphs and the stats have made it even clearer that numbers are engineered, so they remain an integral part of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.
R0: 1.43
Total: 350,279 (+2,444)
Dead: 20,125 (+153)
Healed: 302,528
Critical: 3,868 (-14)
Admitted: 27,626 (+644)
Tests: 2,939,840
