Yalda Night, the longest night of the year and an Iranian tradition, came and went, leaving Islamic Republic officials without any more excuse in the possible increasing number of cases in the upcoming days, due to relaxation of “lockdown.” In the meantime, Fatemieh Days are approaching and authorities are preparing “protocols” to hold 10 days of crowded gatherings. The Ministry of Health continues to manipulate the daily COVID-19 reports, showing sharp decline in number of deaths and cases! Another way for the theocratic regime to pretend everything is OK to attend the mourning rituals.
On the other hand, according to the Islamic Republic calendar, today was also “Nurse Day” which coincides with the birth of Zeinab, Hossein’s sister! Nurses in Iran hospitals have been fighting the novel coronavirus for more than 10 months on the front lines with low and unpaid wages, no benefits and extremely low number of nurses to beds! Namaki has been promising to pay their wages and benefits for months now.
Today, Khamenei showed his face saying the hiring of nurses should be followed up seriously. Health Minister immediately came out and said 20,000 new nurses will be hired soon! He had said 30,000 had been hired before which was not true. Dr Zali, head of Corona Combating Committee in Tehran, admitted shortage of nurses in hospitals is prevalent and a huge problem. He said, there are about 145,000 clinical nurses in the country, of whom 60,000 have contracted coronavirus and of those 52,000 have recovered fully! He didn’t clarify what happened to the remaining 8,000. Previously, other officials have given other numbers.
Deputy Health Minister Raisi said premature reopenings and not abiding by the protocols will cause resurgence of COVID-19 and another peak soon. He also said, “It’s too early to claim victory and useless to evaluate countries’ response to coronavirus pandemic. We should wait for the pandemic to end before assessing responses.” Saeed Namaki has been bragging about how great he’s been managing the crisis and claimed Islamic Republic is ahead of US 5 to 1!
Sima Sadat Lari presented her daily fake data. She announced 6,312 new coronavirus infections and 177 COVID-19 deaths in Iran in the past 24 hours. That’s a small increase compared to yesterday. The same number of counties in “orange” and “yellow” categories while testing decreased compared to yesterday. Basic Reproduction Rate (R0) and graphs depict the devastating human catastrophe in the past 10 months.
R0: 4.44
Total: 1,158,384 (+6,312)
Dead: 53,625 (+177)
Recovered: 885,054
Critical: 5,563 (-28)
Admitted: 219,705 (-2,976)
Tests: 7,046,447 (8.4% of the population, assuming each test was performed on 1 person)
