1076 new confirmed cases of Coronavirus and 21 new deaths are the “official” numbers announced by the Ministry of Health today. The cases have increased almost for all provinces except for two. Mazandaran, Qom, Tehran, and Isfahan have seen the most jump.
Total: 5823
Dead: 145
Healed: 1669
Iran International reports the number of deaths as 670 while officials say it is 145. Based of experience and local witnesses, even Iran International stat seems to be optimistic.
Dr. Saeid Namaki, Iran’s Health Minister, doesn’t stop blaming the people! For the second day in a row, he said,”People are not following self-quarantine instructions and are traveling to N Iran. There is traffic everywhere.” They even have published photos of traffics on social media, but they were from years ago! IRIB showed a video that people were stuck on traffic going to Gilan. But here is an easy way of checking the facts, you can do the same for any other town/city in N Iran.
But as usual, the officials only know how to lie and blame the crisis on people, who had no role in hiding the truth, causing to spread it all over the country, downplaying a deadly disease,….
Shortage of supplies such as masks, gloves, disinfectant solutions,… is still troublesome despite the aids other countries have sent to Iran. But locals report all those aids are ending up in black market with much higher price, and nothing reaches the people in need. This video is an example of mismanagement and corruption of the IR regime:
While some officials such as Fatemeh Rahbar, a parliament rep for Tehran, are dead due to COVID-19, but those are the ones who were kept silent and none of them had taken any video of themselves saying, “I have Corona too.”, making the theory of lying officials even more possible.
Officials deny the idea that 30-40% of Tehran population may contract Coronavirus by March 20, but if the cities are not quarantined and the public don’t stay at home, it doesn’t seem too far fetched. Just look at the jumps in the past few days for Tehran alone! More than 200 in 3 days in the “official” stat. Considering the virus stays hidden in carriers, some may be mistaken for common cold or flu,… many people would feel the disease one way or the other.
Yazd, Kerman, Mazandaran, Gilan, and Semnan provinces have closed all incoming roads to their cities. Representative of Rasht in parliament, Gholam Ali Jafarzadeh, says, “We need to build field hospitals immediately. Hospitals are at full capacity. The numbers for infected and dead people in Gilan are horrifying, even test kits for suspected cases is not available. Qom must have been quarantined and whomever opposed it, made a grave mistake and betrayed other Iranians. If nothing happens, we’ll witness a humanitarian catastrophe there.”
Iranians have been screaming about Islamic Republic’s mismanagement, corruption and lies for WEEKS before we reached this point. It’s time for WHO and other international organizations to step up and take full responsibility of managing the crisis.