Sat 07 March 2020:
Reports of the coronavirus infecting members of Iran’s establishment have angered Iranians, with some dismissing the infections as fake, and others accusing elites of monopolizing access to medical testing.
Deputy Parliament speaker Abdul Reza Misri said Tuesday that 23 of Iran’s 290 lawmakers had the virus, a big jump from the handful who posted online videos in the preceding week saying they were infected. Misri did not provide a full list of the infected lawmakers’ names.
Iranian state media have said at least a dozen other prominent government and religious figures also have tested positive for the virus since late February, most notably Masoumeh Ebtekar, vice president for women and family affairs.
They said several of them died of the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus, including Mohammad Mir-Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Hadi Khosroshahi, a former ambassador to the Vatican, and Hussein Sheikh al-Islam, an adviser to Iran’s foreign minister.
Iranian news sites announced the death of Sheikh al-Islam, another former diplomat, Thursday.
Iran’s health ministry said the national death toll from the virus rose to 107 out of 3,513 confirmed cases Thursday, compared to 92 deaths and 2,922 cases the day before. It also said it had detected the virus in all 31 Iranian provinces for the first time, with Bushehr being the last province added to the list.
Some Iranians, suspicious of their government after it admitted to falsely denying responsibility for the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet in January, have used social media to accuse officials of misleading the public again, this time about the severity of the outbreak and how it has affected the ruling political and religious elites.
Iranian global health scholar Kamiar Alaei, co-president of the Institute for International Health and Education in Albany, New York, told VOA Persian that suspicions of Iranian officials pretending to have the virus are “completely understandable” in light of public distrust toward the government.
“But it is hard to verify that, and I don’t think everybody has pretended,” Alaei added, pointing to the deaths of some of the infected establishment figures.
Alaei said several factors appear to have contributed to the spread of the virus in Iran’s ruling circles, such as establishment figures potentially being in contact with travelers from China, a key Iranian economic partner that has seen the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak. Iran and China have maintained air links in recent weeks.
Alaei said other contributing factors include frequent travel by political and religious figures to Qom, the Iranian holy city where the virus has had the severest impact, and the custom of greeting people with kisses to the cheek, a type of close contact that can spread the virus.
Iranian social media users also have complained about the apparent ease of government and religious leaders getting access to the nation’s limited medical testing resources, and the speed with which some of those figures have received the results of coronavirus tests.
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