The same Health Minister who said he wished he could do more than praying, asking and begging, is talking about “standing against anything that would threaten our children at schools” after schools reopening. Now, why didn’t he use the same firm response about Muharram gatherings and not banning travel during Muharram holidays is because they needed an excuse for the COVID-19 resurgence coming after Muharram!
At the same time, Dr Zali, head of Corona Combating Committee in Tehran, warned about the soon to arrive third wave saying controlling coronavirus in Tehran is very difficult. He mentioned schools reopening would increase the use of public transportation which would in turn increase the chances of spreading the virus even faster. In describing the reasons behind difficulties of controlling coronavirus, Zali said before the new school year, there are more than 400,000 cars entering city of Tehran on a daily basis from Alborz province alone! More than 800,000 use buses and 850,000 use the Metro system! District 4 of Tehran has more residents than the entire Ilam province.
Despite all these facts, and knowing that Tehran province has about 15% of total Iran population, Islamic Republic refuses to ban traveling between provinces, or reimpose some more restrictions or even allow remote working! On the other hand, wants to reopen schools with in-person attendance, and held crowded Muharram gatherings.
Test kits are rare to find, people can’t afford to go for testing and under 4% of people are tested after 198 days, but head of University Jihad claims his institution has made COVID-19 diagnostic test kits which will be exported to other countries with approval from Ministry of Health! Not only he’s not the only official to make such claim, but it also shows that the problem may not be the number of test kits but the will at how many per day should be performed!
Sima Sadat Lari, the Ministry of Health Spokesperson, announced 1,858 new cases and 125 deaths in the past 24 hours, significant increases from the past 2 days. The same 28 provinces in critical conditions. Cases in Qom are soaring rapidly when Kohgiluyeh-Boyerahmad officials announced full hospital beds in the province. These are official news while we have been reporting about these for WEEKS and MONTHS!
Basic Reproduction Rate (R0) and graphs continue to be the best indicator for the ongoing crisis. Based on the highly criticized and discredited stats by the Ministry of Health, active cases started to rise again when the number of critical patients have been declining during the past week.
R0: 1.44
Total: 378,752 (+1,858)
Dead: 21,797 (+125)
Healed: 326,801
Critical: 3,693 (-16)
Admitted: 30,154 (+56)
Tests: 3,281,961
