CHRI:

Amid a rising death toll in Iran from the COVID-19 coronavirus strain, public health experts are suggesting that the number of infections in the country is significantly higher than those officially reported by the Iranian government.

“[Iranian authorities] don’t want to admit that they’re facing a major outbreak,” said public health expert Kamiar Alaei in an interview with the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on February 26, 2020.

Alaei noted that the Iranian health care system has the capacity and infrastructure to counter a coronavirus outbreak, but state officials had not rapidly and effectively mobilized their resources “due to political concerns.”

“Because they hid the outbreak in Iran, health guidelines were not promptly updated, and healthcare workers were not trained on how to deal with; nobody was prepared or ready for it,” said Alaei, who helped develop harm reduction programs in Iran that were focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and other infectious diseases.

An Iranian health ministry spokesman announced on February 26, 2020, that 19 people had died from COVID-19 and 139 had tested positive with it. But an earlier statement by a lawmaker in the city of Qom, where the outbreak is believed to have started, claimed that 50 people had died from it as of February 13.

However, a group of Toronto-based scientists and doctors suggested that the actual number of infections could be closer to 18,000.  Their preliminary epidemiological study was published online on February 24.

“Given the low volumes of air travel to countries with identified cases of COVID-19 with origin in Iran (such as Canada), it is likely that Iran is currently experiencing a COVID-19 epidemic of significant size,” noted the study published by the medRXiv website, an online archive and distribution server that prints preliminary, non-peer-reviewed studies related to the medical, clinical, and related health sciences.

“A large epidemic in Iran could further fuel global dissemination of COVID-19,” said the study.

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