Ministry of Health announces 1192 new confirmed cases and 147 deaths in the past 24 hours. That is the highest number of deaths in a day announced by officials which are hugely undercounted.
Total: 17,361
Deaths: 1,135
Healed: 5,710
Iran International, a resourceful London based Persian news agency, reports 3,035 total deaths in the country, which means 651 people lost their lives since yesterday from COVID-19.
Live map separately for each province:
Dr Zafarghandi, head of Iran Medical Council says, the peak is not here yet and we may get there by March 27! He also confirmed that the stat you hear from officials is much less than the real number of people infected. He added, that could have many reasons, but the main ones being: not everyone gets tested, some are diagnosed by CT scan and not accepted by the ministry as a COVID-19 patient, and many are carriers without knowing while some may self-quarantine without any hospital records. He also asked everybody to stay home during the Persian New Year holidays, starting from Friday, March 20.
To prevent spreading the disease, all Tehran taxis are forbidden from going to other provinces until April 4. Many countries have been sending medical supplies, equipment and cash to Iran in order to help curbing the disease. Turkey, China, Qatar, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Russia, UK, Germany, France,… are just some of those. Thousands of protective gears for healthcare workers, N95 and three-layer masks,… are part of the packages. However, people and hospital staff still complain of the shortage and most of those items are sold on black markets with huge markup prices. And still they’re pushing for US sanctions to be lifted while they have access to all this aid packages!
Parliament has been closed for weeks and after many criticize this move, they convened the first digital meeting and it didn’t go well, just like everything else with this regime. The representatives get paid huge salaries, drive luxury cars and live in mansions but close to half of them didn’t have their “special tablet and SIM card” to join the meeting! And some of them are so illiterate that need classes to teach them how to use the tablet which hasn’t been done as of yet!
Healthcare professionals are dying every day and that increases the workload on other staff in hospitals. The situation is beyond belief. Let’s hope warmer spring days could come to the rescue and improve the situation at least to some extent.