Continued — Part Two of “Coronavirus: Facts We Need to Know and What We Can Do”

Meanwhile, a member of parliament has reported more than fifty deaths in Qom, and spread of the disease to different Iranian cities has been reported. It is extremely difficult to obtain an accurate understanding of the situation and severity of the disease in Iran because statistical discrepancies have created an ambiguous picture that makes the figures difficult to interpret. Yet even accepting the official figures leads to only two possible conclusions:

1) The number of existing but undiagnosed cases is far greater than the number officially confirmed. If this is compared with the global average, it would mean at least close to one thousand undiagnosed cases, and under more realistic assumptions thousands of undiagnosed infected people in the community, each of whom could become a new source of transmission when within less than two metres of others. This would imply very rapid spread. Each time one person is tested and receives a positive result, a major question confronts us: how many other people like that one person are walking through the streets of our cities undiagnosed? The number of carriers with relatively mild symptoms is much greater than the number of diagnosed cases.

2) Healthcare resources in Iran are at a very meaningful distance from the global average. This too is not surprising, because our management of harm arising from disasters appears to require serious revision in every area. For example, deaths from road accidents are reported as 3 per 100,000 in England and 28 per 100,000 in Iran. This roughly tenfold difference in fatalities seems visible across events ranging from floods and earthquakes to road accidents and disease.

One of the greatest dangers for any society in a crisis is false information provided by those managing the crisis. Unfortunately, this has happened so repeatedly in Iran that it has seriously damaged national trust and solidarity, and cooperation between people and social administrators in times of crisis.

Regarding coronavirus, the bitter reality before us is that the possibility of Iran very soon facing an uncontrolled epidemic has become a foreseeable one. What becomes clearer each day is that we may not be able to control this disease and that its spread may infect hundreds of thousands of people in Iran.

In such circumstances it is extremely important to reach a realistic and accurate understanding of what lies ahead. The larger truth is that perhaps not only Iran, but the world as a whole, will face very serious challenges in controlling this disease.