Another record is broken! Number of daily COVID-19 death toll reaches 272, while the most was 251 yesterday! Active cases keep rising, healthcare staff are burnt out and hospitals are at full capacity! Critical cases have increased significantly in the past few days, which only signals more deaths in upcoming days. There’s no plan to ban travels or a total lockdown on capital, where everybody in the government agrees the situation is beyond critical.
Sima Sadat Lari, Ministry of Health Spokesperson, reported her daily manipulated and widely discredited stats. 30 provinces remain in critical status while 4,206 new cases were confirmed with PCR tests in the past 24 hours. Testing remains in the same range and only performed on symptomatic non-critical patients. Due to shortage of test kits and its high prices, many patients are clinically diagnosed which are not included in the daily stats!
In the meantime, Health Minister says Iranian made COVID vaccine has been tested on monkeys and will start human trial in 2-3 weeks. He’s said the same thing months ago! He also said 1.7 million doses of flu vaccine have been imported and is being administered to pregnant women in rural areas and the second batch will be sent to drugstores which then the second vulnerable group will be able to purchase it. He added, “16 million doses have been ordered but only receiving them in batches due to lack of currency.” 16 million doses for 83,000,000 population while it’s already too late! If Islamic Republic could discover COVID-19 vaccine while all developed countries with multi-billion dollar investments haven’t achieved yet, why not produce flu vaccine which has been in the market for decades?! It’s worth noting, Dr Mardani has previously debunked officials’ claims saying Iran doesn’t have the necessary equipment and knowledge to produce any kind of vaccine.
On the other hand, IRIB head’s letter to his deputy to increase wages of his employees by 30%, has caused some backlash on social media. Users ask Nobakht, Director of Planning & Budget Organization in Rouhani’s administration, where does this budget comes from and if that’s more important than 4months unpaid wages of nurses, who are sacrificing their lives in front line of fighting the deadly coronavirus!
Basic Reproduction Rate (R0) and graphs indicate the overwhelming ongoing COVID-19 crisis in Iran which has caused collapse of the healthcare system!
R0: 1.73
Total: 504,281 (+4,206)
Dead: 28,816 (+272)
Healed: 409,121
Critical: 4,533 (+51)
Admitted: 66,344 (+1,202)
Tests: 4,340,831 (6.0% of the population, assuming each test was performed on 1 person)
