Those interactive figures shows the genaral domestic situation and trend of COVID-19 in Iran.
The following two interactive plots describe the daily growth trend and total growth trend of confirmed cases, death cases and recovered cases in Iran. It may seem a bit messy at first. Actually, because I use the plotly package Sievert (2020), you can zoom in at any interval to get the daily details.
The outbreak in Iran was very aggressive at the beginning and brought about two unique conditions. One is the high mortality rate, the second is that the proportion of infected officials or athletes is relatively large. I will analyze the reasons in combination with interactive figures below.
First, Iran is located in an extremely important transportation hub and has close contacts with neighboring countries. Also, Iran is also a famous religious country, and mosques with extremely dense crowds are all over the country. In this dense and mobile environment, covid-19 is particularly vulnerable to outbreaks. As a result, the virus followed the footsteps of believers, not only in Iran, but also in neighboring Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and so on.
From the figure 1, We know that on February 19, the first diagnosis was appeared in Iran, and both patients died on the same day. The follow-up confirmed cases increased gradually, and the mortality rate was once as high as 20%. In my opinion, the first unique case of high fatality rate is that the Iranian government and people did not detect the epidemic until the emergence of dying patients, before which the virus had been spreading rapidly without hindrance.
The second unique situation of high infection rate of government officials or athletes is that the virus has been rampant for a long time, but the country and people have never been vigilant, so the probability of infection of any group is greatly increased. Therefore, the reason for the high infection rate of this group of people is that they are relatively rich, so they know the test results faster than the civilians, and when the results of the civilian examination are also available, their proportion will decrease. These two unique situations undoubtedly once again confirm the incompetence of the Iranian government and its lack of epidemic prevention and early warning capability, as well as the shortage of medical inspection materials.
After solving these two questions, we continue to pay attention to the Figure 1. It can be clearly seen that the number of patients cured in Iran increased significantly from April 6 to April 11, which obviously gave the Iranian government high confidence to revive the economy. It can be seen from Reuter news Staff (2020) that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced on April 5 that he intended to start from April 11, under the supervision of the Ministry of health, “all low-risk economic activities will be resumed on the 11th”, and the “low-risk” economic activities in the capital Tehran are planned to resume on the 18th.
However, let’s focus on June, after Iran gradually relaxed the epidemic prevention restrictions, the new epidemic situation rebounded significantly. On June 2, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Iran once again exceeded 3,000, and reached an breaking-record number of 3,574 on June 4, which undoubtedly intensified people’s concern about the second wave of the largest outbreak in the Middle East.
The Iranian government quickly adopted new measures, according to BBC News Rahimpour (2020), Iran’s president said that restrictions could be reimposed if people did not comply with social distance and health rules.
Figure 1: The General Situation of Iran
The following Figure 2 shows the overall growth trend of Iran. It can be seen that before the middle of March, the proportion of death cases and confirmed cases is very alarming. This shows that Iran’s preparation is completely inadequate, its early warning ability for the virus is extremely poor, and the epidemic situation is not detected until the emergence of dying patients. During this period, the virus spread unimpeded in Iran, which led to the astonishing growth rate of confirmed case. This also shows that Iran’s medical supplies are relatively low, and the proportion of death cases began to decline slowly after receiving international assistance.
Figure 2: Total Trend
The harm COVID-19 has caused to the world is not only limited to people’s life safety, but also make a great impact on economy and culture, which has also rung the alarm bell to the leadership of countries all over the world. It was most of the leaders who chose to ignore the outbreak before they first faced the epidemic that they pushed the outbreak again.
Looking at the international and domestic levels of Iran, Iran’s current serious situation, in addition to being in the core area of the Middle East and an important international transportation hub, is still that the authorities do not pay attention to the COVID-19 epidemic situation, and the prevention and inspection are not started until after the death, which also leads to Iran’s total confirmed cases ranking 12th in the world. As Iran itself is not a developed country, the lockdown period can not last too long, otherwise the domestic economy will collapse. However, due to the fact that the Iranian government did not fully prepare for the resumption of work and production, which directly led to the second outbreak of the epidemic, they had to lock down the country again.
From my perspective, this is an unsolved problem. If the blockade is too long, the economic collapse will harm the people, whereas the lifting of restrictions on the outbreak of epidemic will also harm the people. I don’t know which option is better. What I just can say is that all these matters should be blamed for COVID-19. I hope that 2020 will pass soon, and the destiny can quickly return happiness and health to us!
Rahimpour, Rana. 2020. “Coronavirus: Iran Fears Second Wave After Surge in Cases.” 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52903443.
Sievert, Carson. 2020. Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, Plotly, and Shiny. Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com.
Staff, Reuters. 2020. “Iran’s Rouhani Says Low-Risk Economic Activities to Resume from April 11 Amid Coronavirus.” Reuters. 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-iran/irans-rouhani-says-low-risk-economic-activities-to-resume-from-april-11-amid-coronavirus-idUSKBN21N07O.