Country: Iran
Continent: Asia
Governing Party:++ None, so far as I can see: all ministers serve under the Supreme Leader and the President
Political affiliation: I guess you’d say right wing?
Main crisis leaders:++ Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader), Ebrahim Raisi (President), Mohammad Mokhber (Vice President)
Status of country: Islamist Theocracy
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 9,000 or 100,000
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 34 or 210
Cases (at time of writing):** 7,251,429
Deaths (at time of writing): 141,44 or 270,898 depending on source
Date of first lockdown: March 14
Duration: 37 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 60
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 69%
Score:*** 25
How do you think the virus got on in an Islamist state? Yeah, if you want real, hardline, uncompromising, stuck-in-the-eighteenth-century good old blood and guts Islamic fundamentalist fire, Iran is the place to go. As I note above, the system of government is hard for me to work out, given only the most cursory look at how it works, but I don’t think there are any political parties and even the President is very much subservient to the Supreme Leader, who basically seems to rule more or less like an absolute monarch. His word is law, and even presidents can be dismissed or - presumably - imprisoned or maybe even executed on his orders.
So it will come as a shock to absolutely nobody that Iran followed the “Chinese approach” when it came to outbreaks in its country, which is to say, they told everyone who knew about it to keep it buttoned unless they fancied losing various important parts of their anatomy. Iran has never been that forthcoming anyway (remember the nuclear facilities back in the 2000s?) and tends to forcibly isolate itself from the west, and from most of the rest of the world too, so they were hardly going to be sharing information were they? As a result, early reports of cases there are hard to verify, but it looks like some medical professionals, worried about the coming crisis and braver than most, spoke to a reporter for the west on condition of anonymity, being quite attached to all their bodily parts. From their data it seems the first case in Iran may have been as early as December of 2019, almost just as the Chinese were realising they had a big problem on their hands. Not only were they told to shut up, but in a move so massively arrogant as to all but defy logic, they were told not to wear protective gear, for fear of causing a panic if anyone saw them. Oh yeah, that’s cool: risk your life for the State. If you die, the Prophet will be pleased, but he may ask you to wear a mask before you’re admitted into Paradise. As for those seventy-two virgins, well, you just remember the social distancing rule, buddy, all right? Last thing we need up here is a fucking outbreak of Covid-19!
I have to admit, I’m staggered. I mean, I knew the Americans were crazy (some of them anyway) and would risk their lives and those of others to apparently prove a point, or be the alpha dog, but though mask mandates were only ordered in a few states, I feel sure that even in the reddest of the red states the doctors were not discouraged from wearing masks and PPE, much less forbidden to do so. On February 19 - not quite sure why, but they must have been forced into it - the government announced the first death. This surely came as a surprise, as up to then the public had been kept in the dark about Covid, and with presumably little or no access to western media, would likely have known nothing about the plague that was already in their country wreaking havoc. As one of the doctors reportedly said, “We reported the first death before we reported the first case.” Surely a unique situation.
Showing the difference between official case/death counts and actual ones, a graphic on Wiki shows that on February 19 two deaths were reported, but the anonymous doctors barked bitterly to the reporter that there were already so many dead that a bulldozer had to be hired by a local cemetery in order to bury them. The airline controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mahan Air, stubbornly continued flying into China, indeed into Wuhan, long after other countries had stopped services to the Asian continent. As cases, and deaths, spiralled out of control, the Revolutionary Guard were detailed to visit hospitals and seize death counts before they could be released to the media. Iran would become a focus of the virus, but would do its best to remain the tightest-lipped and least cooperative of all countries in reporting its progress.
It was of course, as it ever has been, all about control. If the people, who were supposed to look to the Supreme Leader as a kind of god figure (not really, but the representative of the Prophet on Earth, so maybe a far more powerful and active Pope?) realised that there was something Khamenei had lost control over, his power might come into question, and that would never do. Can’t wait to see how North Korea approached this! They think their guy IS a god! Anyway, back in Iran the idea of Covid being used as a tool of suppression, a sort of Covid conspiracy theory before there were Covid conspiracy theories, was spread around, as the government blamed the USA for over-hyping the virus in order to, get this, disrupt Iran’s elections! Oh yeah. America was already battling its own president’s refusal to even acknowledge the existence of Covid-19, but had time to sneakily interfere in Iran’s internal politics! Right.
The regime also vowed to take action against anyone who tried to find out, tell or otherwise fuck with the truth. Iran didn’t need the truth. Iran couldn’t handle the truth. No truth handler, it! Bah! I deride its truth-handling abilities, and so on. In fact, it could handle it, it just didn’t want to, or to be more accurate, it didn’t want it getting out. So the usual heavy-handedness went on while the virus, unconcerned about Allah or Mohammed or Ali fucking Khamenei, went about its business. Look, I know, and you know that the virus is not sentient, so this is just for artistic purposes, but Covid must have considered an extended stay in Iran. So nice: the people ignore you, there are no precautions at all, you can kill at will - why would you want to leave?
And it didn’t. Iran would become another of the huge hot-spots where cases, and deaths, would absolutely go through the roof. So much, then, for Allah’s divine protection.
As is usually the case though, one rule for them and one for us. The parliamentary session held on February 29 required all members to submit to body temperature readings (the closest they would allow to Covid testing I guess) and when three members were found to be in the range which would indicate a positive test they were asked not to attend. Fuck you, all three said, and went anyway. How Trumpian of you, guys. By March they had at least admitted publicly to the outbreak, and a committee was set up to tackle it. Old enmities and rivalries surfaced when Iran (having previously called them a “tool of the western hegemony”) asked the IMF for money to help them combat the spread of the disease, and Trump said “I’ll be buggered by a Democrat before I let those filthy muslim bastards have any of our money!” Or words to that effect, possibly those exact words, who knows? Basically, the US said no, so the IMF spread its hands and said, sorry guys. No cash for you. No doubt muttering about capitalist infidels and pulling out those plans for an attack on a US embassy somewhere, the Supreme Leader fumed but could do nothing. In fairness, had this somehow been reversed, do you think old Ali would have helped out brother Donald? As if.
With the news now out in the open, and terrible retribution and punishment no longer on the tabel (well, not from the government anyway; the virus was about to hand out its own terrible form of poetic justice) one of the premier colleges in Iran published a study which gave three, more or less equally bleak, scenarios: if people cooperated with health guidelines, the Republic could expect to see in the region of 12,000 deaths before this thing blew itself out. If there was a more moderate response, the deaths would climb to 110,000, and if nobody cooperated the death toll would be in excess of three million. That of course did not stop Iran screaming about western influences, and the doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres were kicked out, accused of being spies. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!
Trump madness reached into Iran, as over 700 people died as a result of drinking Methanol, believing, somehow, that it was protection against the virus. Might as well have been drinking bleach. Oh. Wait. Never mind. Not at all to anyone’s surprise, at least outside of Iran, many prominent politicians and public figures, including those in the Health Ministry, were infected and quite a few died. I’m not going to go writing all their long bloody names here, but suffice to say Iran’s first ambassador to the Vatican found himself unexpectedly closer to Allah than he had intended, a member of the Supreme Leader’s Expediency Council shuffled off too, as did a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a former ayatollah and a film director. A whole lot more got sick. Typically, Iran blamed the USA in a conspiracy whereby the “Great Satan” had engineered the virus, or a version of it, to specifically target Iranians. Sounds familiar, don’t it? And where the USA is, can Israel be far behind? Natch, the Jews got pulled into the conspiracy, another one without of course a shred of proof.
Crackdowns continued. Anyone who was seen to be promoting or disseminating “false” information (ie, true) was arrested and charged, and eventually in a Hitlerian move, all newspapers were shut down. To date, Iran is said to have arrested over 3,500 people on charges of, well, whatever they want to charge them with I guess. Probably sedition, or spreading information deemed to be harmful to the regime, or god knows what. Iranians were not allowed take part in vaccine testing by “foreign” companies (I doubt they had their own vaccine developed, as surely Allah wanted them to die, so to oppose his will… you know how it goes). Prisoners were released - up to 70,000 - and others didn’t wait, breaking out or rioting - and then breaking out - as chaos erupted across the state as it headed for its first lockdown, despite the assurances given only weeks before that there would be none.
Unlike western democracies - and even Saudi Arabia - where pandemic payments were made available to the public, in Iran these were seen as loans, and to be repaid with four percent interest. Nice. A phrase that really echoes in just about any country rang true here too: with the lifting of restrictions, the number of new cases rose. It’s staggering to me how people just did not get it. When we do France, I’ll be remarking on how Parisians, released from lockdown, immediately - and I mean immediately - ran out into the streets and mingled with not a care for social distancing, masks or any other precautions. Children being let out of school, with about as much sense of responsibility. And of course, very quickly cases spiked again. But it happened everywhere, especially here. You can of course understand people’s frustration and the need to get back to normal, but you know, the virus don’t care about normal, and it was just waiting to inflict further death and illness once restrictions allowed it to get in range of people again. And they helped.
Although Iran made Remdesivir locally, this is not a vaccine but a treatment, and they were eventually constrained to bow to the inevitable and import vaccines from the USA, despite opposition by the friendly old Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who probably feared the Great Satan was trying to turn all Iranians into Christians or something. Given the lack of any sort of precaution, lockdown or even information about the virus up to four months after the first case may have been detected there, Iran became another Italy or Spain, spreading the tentacles of Covid far and wide. Cases resulted from contact with Iran in places as far apart as Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Qatar and even Thailand. Spread the love, that’s what I say! I’m sure Mohammed would have approved.
Nevertheless, the EU provided 20 million Euro to Iran to help them combat the outbreak - a long long way from the five billion it wanted from the IMF, but I guess something is better than nothing - and various aid agencies sent workers and supplies to the stricken state. Trump grinned he would be willing to help “if they asked”. He’d probably like that request on bended knee, the Supreme Leader kissing a Bible. His sanctions against the country for their nuclear ambitions had of course made it doubly difficult for efforts to combat the virus to work, but Trump just grinned while one of his lobby buddies snarled that no aid of any kind should be allowed get through to Iran, effectively I guess making the - completely ludicrous - case that they should all be left to die.
Speaking of death - and with the Coronavirus, when are we not? - many accusations were levelled at the Iranian government that they underreported cases and especially deaths (quelle surprise, huh?) with some sources claiming the figures could be as much as five times higher than were officially reported. One source (possibly the reporter that spoke to the doctors at the beginning of the pandemic, referred to above, or someone who used his data) claimed that when the government reported 34 deaths on February 28 there had been in fact 210, while cases of 9,000 just before lockdown were widely believed to be more in the 100,000 range. Even the First Deputy Minister of the Parliament agreed that the figures released were “not real”. Leaked records from the Iranian government, obtained by the BBC in March, showed that cases and deaths were being underreported by a factor of three-to-one, in other words three times as many were being infected/dying as were being admitted to officially. Satellite images of huge freshly-dug mass graves backed up the doctors’ contention that far more were dying initially than had been reported, and that more were expected to die.
One opposition group, now in exile and dedicated to the overthrow of the current government (therefore I guess what the Supreme Leader referred to as “counter-revolutionaries”), estimated the death toll to be as high as TWENTY times that reported. Needless to say, the official position was to deny any allegations or accusations of suppressing of numbers of cases and deaths by the government of Iran. In July of 2020 the US Department of State accused Iranian state officials of embezzling money from the fund of over one billion Euro, meant to combat the outbreak, and of hoarding masks, PPE and other medical supplies for sale on the black market.
Clearly, the virus is still slicing its way through the populace; as recently as February of this year (2022) a quarter of the Iranian parliament have contracted the Omicron strain, and death figures continue to mount, though what the true picture is I guess we will never know for sure.