With 144 more deaths in one day, the total officially confirmed infection cases of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Iran jumped by 2,926 on March 27.
In his daily update on Friday, Dr. Kianoush Jahanpur, the Spokesman of Iran's National Coronavirus Combat Taskforce, said the total number of coronavirus infections in the country has now reached 32,332.
A total of 2,378 have died of the disease in Iran since February 19 when the first two cases of coronavirus deaths were reported in the city of Qom according to the official announcements.
The recent high infection figures indicate an acceleration in the identification of new cases which may be due to better availability of test kits and a government online screening initiative for identification of possible cases.
Imported or internationally donated test kits have now become more available to the Iranian health system but according to Dr. Jahanpur Iran will also start using home-grown test kits soon. He said Iran's Pasteur Institute, a century-old government-funded medical research center in Tehran, has now approved Iranian-made coronavirus test kits and 80,000 kits per week could be available after approval of the Food and Medicine Agency.
Iran's Health Ministry officials say that an online coronavirus screening plan is now being implemented throughout the country which can push the number of identified cases up considerably. All Iranians have been asked to fill in the online questionnaire and check their symptoms on the government health portal.
Dr. Jahanpur on Thursday said more than 50 million Iranians have signed up on the portal but 30 million more still need to sign up and fill in the questionnaire.
The Health Ministry officials insist that their data is based on the final test of coronavirus on patients, and they exclude the number of persons who have had clinical symptoms of the Covid-19 but were not tested for the virus. Due to unavailability of enough test kits this could considerably keep the numbers low.
Critics, however, allege that the Iranian government for certain political and security reasons intentionally keeps the figures low, so many of the coronavirus infections and deaths are registered as "acute respiratory diseases".
Data gathered by Radio Farda from various national and local media in Iran, as well as comments made by regional authorities and Health Ministry officials, indicate 3,036 people have fallen victim to the novel coronavirus.
Our data shows that as of March 26 at least 59,120 patients had tested positive and been hospitalized for contracting the deadly virus in the country's 31 provinces since February 19. This is nearly double the official number of 32,000 announced by the government.
Radio Farda's estimate is also very conservative, and the real number of the victims could be much higher. The data show that most of the victims belong to the provinces of Isfahan, Gilan, Mazandaran, Golestan, Khorasan Razavi, Tehran and Qom. A World Health Organization official who recently visited Iran has said that the real figures can potentially be up to five times higher.
Iranian health authorities are still reluctant to publish the number of Covid-19 victims in the provinces of Tehran and Qom, possibly due to the high number of the victims in the two neighboring regions and their importance as political and religious centers of the country. They have also refused to publish the breakdown of the number of victims for each province so far.
