Against all experts’ opinions that premature reopening of the country would have serious consequences, National Corona Combating Task Force, and Rouhani as its head, decided to reopen the country on April 11, right after Persian New Year holidays. Most people went back to work and in a few weeks, all restrictions were lifted, leading to a disastrous result. A catastrophe which is still rocking every family in Iran one way or another. Today, several provinces would reimpose certain restrictions but still no travel ban between provinces! According to Sima Sadat Lari, 2,449 new cases and 148 deaths were confirmed in the past 24 hours. That means, based on the fake and manipulated data provided by Ministry of Health, in the past 3 weeks, from June 14 to today, 2,678 people have died of COVID-19, an average of 127.52 per day! That average was 85.41 in the first 53 days of the epidemic.
According to very accurate statistics by Sadat Lari, the total number of “confirmed” cases is 237,878 and 11,408 have lost their lives to the novel coronavirus. However, Dr. Masoud Mardani, an infectious disease specialist and a member of the National Task Force said, “Based on serological tests done across the country, we estimated about 18,000,000 Iranians have contracted the virus which is about 20% of total population.” Also based on Ministry of Health data, the current death rate in the country is 5.4%. If we apply that rate to 18,000,000 cases, that would lead to 972,000 deaths since the beginning of the outbreak, that’s 85 times more than the “official” numbers!
Lari also announced 18 provinces are in “red” or “alarming” situations. Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Hormozgan, Bushehr, East & West Azerbaijan, Kermanshah, Khorasan Razavi and Ilam are designated red while Tehran, Fars, Isfahan, Mazandaran, Hamedan, Zanjan, Sistan-Baluchestan, Lorestan and Alborz are “alarming”. Even though the list is more complete than other days, South Khorasan, Golestan, Ardebil, Kohgiloyeh-Boyerahmad and Kerman officials had raised their concern over increased cases and deaths days ago!
137 days into the outbreak and from tomorrow, July 5, 2020, wearing mask is mandatory inside public spaces! Rouhani said, “Anybody who doesn’t wear a mask should be refused services and if a government employee doesn’t wear one, he/she should be marked as absent!” Another way of blaming and punishing ordinary citizens for government’s incompetency, lies, and cover ups. In the meantime, government media are doing a great job in distracting people from the main issues, by focusing on Islamic Republic’s achievements in the past few years such as “developing a water pipeline” or “starting a new transformer”, and inviting people to attend Friday Prayers in “yellow” and “white” cities, where hundreds of people would be in close contact with each other in a closed space!
Basic Reproduction Rate (R0) and graphs indicate the devastating situation with increased number of critical cases and reducing number of tests performed in the past few days. It’s fascinating that despite all these red provinces and reports of full hospitals across the country, the number of “new cases” doesn’t increase or “active cases” keep declining miraculously.
R0: 1.28
Total: 237,878 (+2,449)
Dead: 11,408 (+148)
Healed: 198,949
Critical: 3,136 (+13)
Admitted: 27,521 (-198)
Tests: 1,769,520 (Number of labs wasn’t mentioned in today’s news. Officials may have finally figured out there are discrepancies when they lie.)
