Since yesterday afternoon 3076 new cases are confirmed and 139 died of Coronavirus, making the total number of infected 35,408 and death toll reached 2,517. For the first time in the daily press conference, Ministry of Health spokesman announced, 3,206 critical patients are admitted in the hospitals across the country, asking people to pray for their recovery. He also said, 57 million people have participated in the online screening process at salamat.gov.ir. He claimed the increase in the daily numbers is because more people are screening themselves. However, there is not much change in the testing numbers or process!
Total: 35,408
Dead: 2,517
Healed: 11,679
Iran International death toll: 5,148 (427 from yesterday)
By announcing the critical patients number, it looks like we have to wait for a jump in the number of deaths very soon.
You can find the graphs on this page.
The spokesman added, “We have more than 10,000 beds ready for mildly infected and recovered people in order to stay away from others, and from today, they would be forced to use these beds and not go home.” He also said the news spread by IRIB mentioning this virus is airborne is false and “we don’t know enough about this virus yet. All we know is from Chinese researchers.”
He admitted, “according to our investigations, it seems like the first cases entered the country early January. Qom was the first place a case was seen or we may have 2 different ground zeros, one Qom and one Rasht, Gilan province.” He confirms the first official patient announced on Feb 20, didn’t have any contact or travel history to China. It sure looks like the head of Mashhad Medical University was right and 700 Chinese clergy students were the source of it. The government didn’t quarantine Qom or Gilan spreading the disease everywhere.
Jahanpur continued there could be more restrictions and for a longer period of time depending on how successful we are at decreasing the number of daily infected. For now, he emphasized people must be following “social distancing” instructions.
In a research conducted by Iranian professors at Virginia Tech and MIT universities estimated more than 916,000 infected and 15,485 dead till 8 days ago. Their research projects more than 1,600,000 cases of positive COVID-19 and 58,000 dead by July if the virus is not contained.
In a piece, a reporter criticized the government for being so slow and stupid in acting against spreading the virus. He said, “40 days ago, the experts and media told you to quarantine Qom, stop Friday prayers and all gatherings but you refused. Now you want to quarantine an entire country?”
Muqtada Al-Sadr, a Shia leader in Iraq backed by Islamic Republic regime, blames the global COVID-19 pandemic on “same-sex marriages” and call on all countries to stop this practice and repent from their sins to contain the disease!
The Islamic Republic regime has done a good job at making everybody forget about their other brutal crimes such as November 2019 protests and political prisoners, while the focus is on the Coronavirus outbreak, and regime’s disastrous management of the crisis.