Thanks to Neo IR -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Masih Daneshvari hospital, a University affiliated hospital, located in Tehran, Iran with a Capacity of 446+extra 318 has closed down for further transfers from Other hospitals in Tehran. Hospitals transfer patients across Tehran while the government ignores the critical situation.
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With dozens of publicly known cases and multiple deaths, Iran is now the epicenter of the coronavirus in the Middle East. Doctors inside the Islamic Republic say the country is now grappling with an “epidemic,” and the response has been hampered not just by government inaction and disinformation but also economic sanctions.
“We think that this virus has been in Iran for the past three to four weeks and has circulated throughout the country. Right now in Iran we are facing a coronavirus epidemic,” said a senior medical doctor at the Masih Daneshvari hospital in Tehran, the country’s top pulmonary public hospital and the main facility overseeing coronavirus patients.
Public officials have not confirmed how the disease arrived in Iran, but it appears to be the locus for the regional outbreak. So far, Afghanistan, Georgia, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Oman reported their first cases of coronavirus, all linked to passengers traveling from Iran.
Since it first announced the presence of COVID-19 last week, Iran has so far reported a total of 245 cases and 26 deaths, a far higher fatality rate than seen elsewhere. The doctor, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said the official tally vastly underestimates the true number of cases. “We didn’t have a way to test people earlier and don’t have the capacity to screen everyone,” he said, in a telephone interview. “Let me put it this way, if in general two out of 100 corona patients die, in Iran, if we now have 20 deaths that means we have 1,000 infected patients.”
The disease is now widely spread across Iran, with the largest concentration reported in the lush northern province of Gilan the holy city of Qom. Earlier this week, a lawmaker from the holy city, Ahmad Amirabadi , announced the death toll in Qom “has reached 50 people”— a claim that was immediately rejected by government officials, including the deputy Health Minister Iraj Haririchi who also advised against mandatory quarantine and called it a “pre world war era” strategy. On Tuesday Harirchi himself tested positive for the virus and is now undergoing treatment.
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Coronavirus: UK fears of undetected cases grow as 13 more test positive
Second person in Britain tests positive without having recently travelled abroad
A patient in Essex has become the second person in the UK to test positive for coronavirus without having recently travelled abroad, fuelling concerns that the virus is circulating in Britain undetected.
Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said the patient “had no relevant travel” and an investigation was under way to determine whether they contracted the virus directly or indirectly from someone who had recently returned from overseas.
The case suggests the country is edging closer to the point where containment becomes impossible, because the virus is being spread by people who are either unaware they are infected, or are diagnosed too late to prevent onwards transmission.
Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, said: “This really adds to the supposition that many are now making that this one is going to be very hard to put back in the box. It makes it particularly difficult to control any outbreak if there are people who don’t know they’re spreading it.”
Boris Johnson will chair a Cobra meeting on Monday to review the next steps aimed at containing the virus. Speaking at a Public Health England laboratory in Colindale, north London, on Sunday, he said: “We will be setting out the various measures in the way public should be responding, and public bodies should be responding.”
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