Iran yesterday announced that 11 more people had died from the new coronavirus in the past day, bringing the Islamic republic’s overall death toll to 77.
In all, 2,336 people have been infected with COVID-19 since the outbreak began, including 835 new cases, Iranian Deputy Minister of Health and Medical Education Alireza Raisi said in remarks aired live on state television.
Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a member of the Expediency Council that advises Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei died on Monday from COVID-19, becoming the highest-ranking official in the Shiite theocracy to be killed by the illness.
Photo: Reuters
Mirmohammadi, 71, died at a north Tehran hospital of the virus, state media said. His mother had reportedly died of the coronavirus in recent days as well.
The virus earlier killed Hadi Khosroshahi, Iran’s former ambassador to the Vatican, as well as a recently elected member of parliament.
Mirmohammadi’s death came as authorities said they have plans to potentially mobilize 300,000 soldiers and volunteers to confront the virus.
Photo: AP / Mizan News Agency / Ali Shirband
After China, Iran has the highest death toll from COVID-19, and experts worry its percentage of deaths to infections, now about 4.4 percent, is much higher than other countries, suggesting the number of infections in Iran may be much higher than current figures show.
Khamenei yesterday told all government agencies to put their resources at the disposal of Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education to help combat the virus, and called on the public to follow the authorities’ recommendations to avoid infection.
The WHO flew medical supplies into Iran from the United Arab Emirates and said a team of experts arrived in Tehran on Monday evening to help local health workers respond to the outbreak.
Meanwhile, a shift in the crisis appears to be taking shape: Hundreds of patients have been released from hospitals at the epicenter of the outbreak in China, while the WHO reported that nine times as many new infections were recorded outside of China as inside it over the previous 24 hours.
Alarming clusters of disease continued to swell in South Korea and Italy, and the virus turned up for the first time in New York City, Moscow and Berlin, as well as Latvia, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Jordan and Portugal.
The worldwide death toll has topped 3,000, and the number of those infected rose to about 89,000 in 70 countries.
UN officials said they were postponing a major conference on women that had been expected to bring up to 12,000 people to New York City next week.
Health officials in Washington state, where a particularly troubling cluster of cases surfaced at a nursing home outside Seattle, said four more people had died from the coronavirus, bringing the number of deaths in the state to six.
In Seattle, King County Executive Dow Constantine declared an emergency and said the county is buying a hotel to be used as a hospital for patients who need to be isolated.
New cases were also reported in New Hampshire and New York on Monday, raising the total in the US to more than 100.
China yesterday announced just 125 new cases over the past 24 hours, the lowest number since authorities began publishing nationwide figures on Jan. 21, while another 31 deaths were reported, all of them in Hubei Province. The figures bring China’s total number of cases to 80,151 with 2,943 deaths.
However, it also reported an increase in COVID-19 cases coming from abroad, all Chinese nationals returning from overseas.
Eight Chinese who worked in the same restaurant in Italy’s northern Lombardy region have tested positive for the virus in Zhejiang Province, and there have also been four confirmed cases originating in Iran — two in Beijing and two in the Ningxia region — and one case in Shenzhen in a person who had traveled from Britain via Hong Kong.
South Korea yesterday reported 599 new cases, bringing the total to 4,335. The death toll rose to 26.
Additional reporting by Reuters and AP
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