10,000 Iranian health workers infected with COVID
DUBAI (Reuters) — Around 10,000 Iranian health workers have been infected with the new coronavirus, the semi-official ILNA news agency quoted a deputy health minister as saying yesterday.
Health services are stretched thin in Iran, the Middle East country hardest hit by the respiratory pandemic, with 7,249 deaths and a total of 129,341 infections. The Health Ministry said in April that over 100 health workers had died of COVID-19.
No more details on infections among health workers were immediately available.
Earlier yesterday, Health Minister Saeed Namaki appealed to Iranians to avoid travelling during the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday later this month to avoid the risk of a new surge of coronavirus infections, state TV reported.
Iranians often travel to different cities around the country to mark the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, something Namaki said could lead to a disregard of social distancing rules and a fresh outbreak of COVID-19.
“I am urging you not to travel during the Eid. Definitely, such trips mean new cases of infection...People should not travel to and from those high-risk red areas,” Namaki was quoted by state television as saying.
“Some 90 percent of the population in many areas has not yet contracted the disease. In the case of a new outbreak, it will be very difficult for me and my colleagues to control it.”
A report by parliament’s research center suggested that the actual tally of infections and deaths in Iran might be almost twice that announced by the Health Ministry.
However, worried that measures to limit public activities could wreck an economy which has already been battered by US sanctions, the government has been easing most restrictions on normal life in late April.
Infected cases have been on a rising trajectory for the past two weeks. However, President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday that Iran was close to curbing the outbreak.
But Iran said it was close to “curbing” the new coronavirus outbreak even as it reported more than 2,000 fresh infections for the third day in a row.
“We have been progressing at every step in the past three months... in fighting this dangerous virus and are nearly on the verge of curbing this disease,” Rouhani said.
Iran would “even not have these problems” if health protocols “were more closely observed in some of the provinces that are currently in an unfavorable situation,” he told a televised Cabinet meeting.
At least 24 of Iran’s 434 counties were “red” — the highest level on the country’s color-coded risk scale, according to deputy health minister Alireza Raisi.
He said at a virus taskforce meeting broadcast on Tuesday that 218 counties were still deemed low-risk, which could drop to 183 since the virus had “started peaking” in some regions.
He added that most of the fatalities since Iran reported its first two deaths in February were above 70 years old, and that younger Iranians were in less danger.
Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said 2,346 new infections were confirmed across the country in the past 24 hours, raising the total to 126,949.
More than 98,800 of those hospitalized had recovered and were discharged, while 2,673 were in critical condition.
He also raised the death toll to 7,183 with 64 fatalities in the past day.
According to Jahanpour, there were no deaths over the same period in nearly a third of Iran’s provinces, while eight others only had one.
Khuzestan province was still the worst-hit, and the rest of the country was in “relative stability,” he added.