25,000 cases a day in Iran, but social distancing is a luxury
Around 400 deaths daily, but still below grim record of 486 Iran reached in November
As Iran faces what looks like its worst wave of the pandemic yet, Tehran commuters still pour into its subway system and buses each working day, even as images of the gasping ill are repeatedly shown on state TV every night.
Iran is now reporting its highest-ever new cases — more than 25,000 a day. Its daily death toll has surged to around 400, still below the grim record of 486 it reached in November.
During the peak of Iran’s last surge, around 20,000 patients were hospitalised across the country. Today, that figure has topped 40,000.
The health ministry warns the number will climb to 60,000 in the coming weeks. Iran remains among the hardest-hit countries in the world and the worst-hit in the Middle East. Overall, Iran has seen 2.2 million reported cases and 67,000 deaths in total.
‘I cannot stop working’
Iranian authorities have put partial lockdowns and other measures back in place to try and slow the virus’ spread.
But in this nation of 84 million people, which faces crushing US sanctions, many struggle to earn enough to feed their families. Many simply giving up on social distancing, considering it an unaffordable luxury.
“I cannot stop working,” said Mostafa Shahni, a 34-year-old construction worker in Tehran. “If I do, I can’t bring home bread for my wife and two kids.”
Hospitals overwhelmed
At Tehran’s Shohadaye Tajrish Hospital, orderlies pushed the bodies of two Covid-19 victims across a parking lot to its morgue, one wrapped in white, the other in a black body bag.
All of its wards on five floors of the hospital are reserved for Covid-19 patients. One empty gurney held a bouquet of roses left for a recently deceased man. A heart-shaped balloon hovered over a still respirator.
Stream of funerals
At the massive Behesht-eZahra cemetery, already reeling from the pandemic, workers laid cinder-block rows of new graves. Mourners in black wept at a stream of funerals. Officials plan to open a new morgue at the site to handle the wave of death, much wrought by what Iranians simply call “corona”.
‘One of the hardest and saddest days in years’
Saeed Khal, the director of Tehran’s main cemetery, said workers buried 350 bodies there on Tuesday alone — at least 150 had died of coronavirus. The cemetery had never processed that many burials in a single day, not even during Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s that saw a million people killed.
It was “one of the hardest and saddest days for my colleagues in the half-centuryhistory of the cemetery,” Khal told state TV.
Vaccine supplies
As of now, Iran has administered over 500,000 vaccine doses, according to the WHO. Supplies, however, remain limited. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has banned US and British-made coronavirus vaccines, saying their import is “forbidden” because he does not trust those nations. Khamenei has approved the import of vaccines from ``safe’’ countries, such as China and Russia, and has backed national efforts to produce a homegrown vaccine with help from Cuba.
But officials keep changing when they say the wider public will be vaccinated as it remains unclear when Tehran will have a promised 60 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
Outside the gates of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Hospital complex, where the poor can receive free treatment at its 1,300 beds, scores crowded around.
“They say the wards are full of corona patients,” said Manijeh Taheri, who sought thyroid treatment for her mother. “I have no idea where to take her when such a huge complex has no place for my mother.”
“We are not going out of the red zone any time soon,” Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi told state media.