Following yesterday‘s increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 in Iran, manipulated data of Islamic Republic Ministry of Health for the past 24hours show another increase in all metrics. Despite warnings about the looming sixth wave in November and low vaccination of students with only 1 dose across the country, the Islamic Republic insists on reopening schools and universities by mid-November.
On the other hand, the new aspects of Arbaeen and last days of Safar “mourning rituals” are unveiled by the officials. Even though they meant to brag about the huge crowd of “pilgrims” to the “holy shrine” in Mashhad, they admitted 3.7million people traveled to the second biggest city in the country and one of the hardest hit cities by Delta during the fifth wave of COVID-19 in Iran. Despite this madness, a representative at the Islamic Republic “parliament” is dissatisfied with the “restrictions put in place by the government during Arbaeen.” Mirzaei failed to mention what restrictions exactly.
In the meantime, airlines take advantage of the chaos and disorganization. Locals report they are charged 2 seats for domestic flights but all seats of the plane are sold to individual passengers. The airlines blame it on the “new directives for Arbaeen and Safar rituals” while the civil aviation agency claim airlines “could be held accountable for this!”
As distrust between people and the Islamic Republic grows, the head of FDA announced 200m doses of vaccines will be provided to people, from foreign (China) and domestic sources. Dr. Shanehsaz went back on his previous promise about importing Johnson & Johnson and said, “there is no such plan in our agenda!” Just like the empty promise of importing Pfizer. It is worth noting, Khamenei banned US and UK made vaccines in January. Meanwhile, Razi Institute rebuked the government and FDA for not granting its “well researched” vaccine, COVPars, emergency use approval while they had approved other vaccines with less scrutiny, such as COVIran Barekat and PastoCoVac and Fakhra!
The Ministry of Health claimed 65,667,467 shots have been administered in Iran since February 9, and only 19,918,743 (23.71% of population) have received both doses of these vaccines.
The Ministry of Health Spokesperson claimed 276 have died of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours and 13,504 tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Professor of Epidemiology at Tehran University believes these numbers must be multiplied by 7 and Civil Registration Organization data show more than 294,000 have died of the disease since February 2020.
R0: 2.10
Total: 5,716,394 (+13,504)
Dead: 122,868 (+276)
Recovered: 5,234,010
Critical: 5,218 (-86)
Active Cases: 359,516 (-2,783)
Total Tests: 33,350,660
