https://arab.news/z7rjf
- Iran began relaxing its lockdown in mid-April
JEDDAH: Iran reported a record 229 deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday as it struggled to contain a virulent second wave of the coronavirus.
The virus has hit Iran harder than any country in the Middle East, but authorities were forced to ease lockdown measures in mid April, as the economy collapsed in the face of US sanctions and the pandemic fallout.
The previous highest daily death toll was on July 9, when the Health Ministry said 221 people had died. In total, Iran has reported nearly 280,000 virus cases and 14,634 deaths, but few either inside or outside the country believe the official figures.
The country was slow to respond to the initial outbreak, and clerics were still encouraging pilgrims to visit shrines in Qom and Mashhad as the virus took hold there.
Hospitals now face acute shortages of medical staff and beds, said Reza Jalili-Khoshnood, a senior official with Tehran’s anti-coronavirus task force.
His comments contrasted with President Hassan Rouhani’s assurances that Iran has sufficient supplies.
Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now regularly shown on state media wearing masks, and encouraging ordinary Iranians to do the same.
Saudi Arabia reported 2,476 new virus cases on Tuesday, increasing the total to 255,825, and the death toll rose by 34 to 2,557. A total of 207,259 patients have recovered from COVID-19.
Health Ministry spokesman Mohammed Al-Abd Al-Aly said the figures were encouraging, and were the result of “returning to normality cautiously and adhering to precautionary measures.”
Worldwide, the virus has infected nearly 15 million people and killed more than 615,000.
In Europe, where economies have been strangled by the pandemic, EU leaders clinched a historic deal on a massive stimulus plan at dawn on Tuesday after almost five days of wrangling.
The agreement paves the way for the European Commission, the EU’s executive, to raise billions of euros on capital markets on behalf of all 27 states, an unprecedented act of solidarity in almost seven decades of European integration.
Many had warned that a failed summit amid the coronavirus pandemic would have put the bloc’s viability in serious doubt after years of economic crisis and Britain’s departure.
In the US, advisers to President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats discussed the next steps in responding to the coronavirus crisis on Tuesday, as congressional Republicans worked on a $1 trillion relief bill.
Congress has so far committed $3 trillion to fighting the pandemic. The virus has killed more than 140,000 people in the US, and in the 12 weeks since Trump signed the last stimulus bill the number of cases has more than tripled to over 3.8 million.
In the UK, the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine could be ready for use by the end of the year but there are no guarantees, the lead developer Sarah Gilbert said on Tuesday.
The experimental vaccine, which has been licensed to AstraZeneca, has produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials.
“The end of the year target, it’s a possibility, but there’s absolutely no certainty about that,” Gilbert said.