The crisis of secrecy in the Corona crisis; 65 million Iranians have either been infected with Covid-19 or are at risk of being infected
Continuing the cover-up and failure to disclose transparent statistics on the spread of the coronavirus in Iran, President Hassan Rouhani admitted that the number of people infected with the virus in Iran is about 25 million; while the spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Health announced that the number of people infected with the coronavirus in Iran from five months ago to today is more than 271,000.
On Saturday, July 19, at a meeting of the coronavirus task force, Hassan Rouhani also announced the death toll at around 14,000, slightly more than the official figure, and said that another 30 to 35 million people would be at risk of infection. Thus, assuming the figures announced by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran are accurate , 65 million Iranians have either been infected with COVID-19 or are at risk of infection.
This statistic was presented at a time when, since the beginning of the coronavirus's arrival in Iran, domestic and foreign experts had emphasized the concealment and provision of false information by officials of the Islamic Republic.
Since the beginning of February last year, when news of deaths from coronavirus in the city of Qom was published, Iranian authorities denied this news, given that events such as the February 12 march and parliamentary elections were ahead, until they were forced to make an official announcement on the last day of February due to the widespread epidemic in the city.
During this period, a report by the Parliamentary Research Center and the opinion of experts from the World Health Organization indicated that the officially published statistics on people infected with the coronavirus in Iran are one-fifth of the actual number.
In the early months of the coronavirus outbreak in Iran, a number of hospitals and provincial health departments also reported a much higher death toll than the official figures. Hospitals were ordered to report the cause of death of some coronavirus patients as acute lung infection.
US officials have also emphasized the Islamic Republic's cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Iran. Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a statement titled "Khamenei's Lies About the Wuhan Virus Are Putting Lives at Risk," made statements about the Iranian regime's lies and cover-ups regarding the coronavirus.
Source: Voice of America
