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As the death toll from the novel coronavirus and number of those infected with the disease in Iran on the rise, the government has officially confirmed 237 deaths and additional 7,161 infected with COVID-19 so far. However, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, who operate outside Iran, reported much higher numbers Saturday, claiming over 1,800 Iranian deaths from the virus, while tens of thousands have contracted it.

Already with the highest number of coronavirus cases in the Middle East, Iranian government officials have warned over the weekend that the number could spike to over 450,000, warning that many of the patients might die. Iran's worsening situation has isolated the country far beyond what the American sanctions against Tehran sought to achieve, as Iranian nationals are barred from entering Turkey and Gulf states, and are subject to harsh restrictions upon their entry to Iraq.

<< Israeli security officials dread having to handle a Gaza coronavirus outbreakCoronavirus quarantine reading list

Irans Revolutionary Guard, the police, and the Iranian military have imposed a closure on the holy city of Qom, where the first cases of the virus in the republic began in January before spreading to the rest of the country, and where many prominent Shiite seminaries operate. All Qom residents who seek to leave must pass through checkpoints set up at all city entrances and undergo a medical examination in a sealed, military vehicle before they are permitted to leave. Shortly after the rapid spread in Qom, hospitals in the city were overflowing with patients, causing a shortage of beds, according to Iranian reports.

Several days ago the Iranian regime announced that it would establish 14 mobile hospitals that could absorb some 2,000 coronavirus patients. The government, however, added that it has encountered difficulties in recruiting the necessary staff to man these hospitals.

The government also has to confront clerics who claim that the virus is biological terror controlled by Irans enemies, and that worshipers should pray at mosques for the eradication of the scourge which is intended to drive a wedge between the people of faith and God and isolate the country. Many religious people have begun posting videos of themselves licking and kissing mosque decorations as a cure and a preventive measure against the disease, while authorities are warning against large gatherings, and schools and universities have already been shuttered.

Iran is also the country in which the largest number of government officials and members of political elite have been stricken by the virus. At least 23 Iranian lawmakers have caught the disease, and two have died. The Islamic Republic's deputy health minister, a senior adviser to the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and President Hassan Rohanis two advisers are among those who contracted the disease. In addition, Hossein Sheikholeslam, who served as former ambassador to Syria and advisor to Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, as well as adviser to Khamenei on Middle Eastern affairs, died from the disease over the weekend.

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The death of Sheikholeslam sparked particular interest as he was among those who planned and carried out the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover that led to the 444-day hostage crisis of American diplomats. At the time he was the familiar face of the student movement that seized the diplomatic compound and frequently appeared at press conferences to report on the condition of the 52 diplomats held in the embassy, conveying the students demands.

Alongside him was usually a young woman, Masuma Avtakar, who now serves as Rohanis deputy for womens and environmental affairs, but cannot come to her office because she is infected with coronavirus. Sheikholeslam, who before the revolution studied at the University of California Berkeley, stopped his studies to take part in the revolution and became the senior expert for successive Iranian governments on Middle Eastern affairs.

In the 1980s, together with four Iranian activists, including Freidon Wardi-njad, current head of Irans official news agency, Hossein Dehghan and Ahmed Wahidi, both former defense ministers, and Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, laid the groundwork for the establishment of Hezbollah. Sheikholeslam was then subsequently appointed Irans ambassador to Damascus, and from there oversaw Hezbollahs activities. When he concluded six years of service in Damascus he returned to Iran and among other posts was put in charge of Iranian policy toward Arab countries, alongside the Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a bombing in early January by a U.S. attack. One may assume that Sheikholeslams name was erased over the weekend from the most-wanted list of many intelligence services.

The sparse reports coming from the Iranian government and the unsubstantiated information on social media show that Iran is having difficulty dealing with the spread of the virus, which has become a threatening political issue. Ordinary citizens and experts have accused the regime not only of concealing information and a shortage of beds and medications, but also of a failure to prevent the spread of the virus in the first days after the contagion became known.

According to a key claim, the government could have limited the extent of the damage, isolated the city of Qom earlier, and warned people against the virus in time. But the government feared that such a warning would impact the number of voters going to the polls and thus would damage the governments image and political legitimacy, which relies on a high voter turnout. Another claim is directed against the decision to export more than a million face masks to China, which resulted in a shortage of masks locally, and now the lack of medicine is sparking controversy among ordinary citizens and doctors, who blame the shortage on the regimes policy toward sanctions.

In the face of the governments argument that the sanctions are the direct reason for the shortage, Iranian experts say that Irans policy of standing strong against sanctions is what could lead to a high number of deaths. It seems that the regime can now only thank the virus for preventing the masses from taking to the streets.

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As Iran's coronavirus death toll rises, there's one thing its regime can be grateful for - Haaretz

The coronavirus outbreak in Iran is among the most severe in the world and by far the largest in the Middle East, with official figures saying some 500 people have died and more than 11,000 are infected.

But there are several indications the outbreak in the Islamic republic -- whose government is known for its opaqueness and censorship -- is far worse than authorities are admitting.

Since the start of the crisis, parliament members and local officials in some of the major epicenters of coronavirus in the country have said the real number of dead and those infected is being grossly understated by the clerical regime that rules Iran.

There are also numerous reports of hospital staffs being warned not to discuss the numbers of deaths and infections from coronavirus with the media.

Amid widespread public distrust of the government, the authorities have given daily updates on the number of coronavirus deaths and infections in Iran while reassuring the public they're acting swiftly to contain the crisis.

But many Iranians believe officials failed to take decisive measures from the beginning of the outbreak, which has claimed the lives of several state officials -- including an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- and infected many others, including two vice presidents, more than 20 parliament deputies, and former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, a top foreign-policy adviser to Khamenei.

Velayati, a pediatrician, is also president of Tehran's Masih Daneshvari Hospital, a leading center for the treatment of people infected with the coronavirus.

Major Underreporting?

Iran reported its first two deaths on February 19, indicating that the outbreak erupted days earlier and that the authorities failed to inform the public about it as it was trying to get voters to take part in the February 21 parliamentary elections.

Well-known Iranian public-health expert Kamiar Alaei, the co-founder and co-president of the New York-based Institute for International Health and Education, said the real number of coronavirus infections in Iran could be five times higher than official figures.

Alaei, who helped implement an HIV-prevention program in Iran before he was arrested with his brother and sentenced to prison on accusations of spying, said a mix of state secrecy as well as poor data collection were behind Iran's underreported figures.

"If you look at the numbers -- and a deputy health minister also said a few days ago -- most of the reported cases are those [who are] hospitalized while about 80 percent of those infected with coronavirus have light symptoms and only about 15 percent go to the hospital," Alaei told RFE/RL, citing a Chinese study. "Therefore, the figures that are being released only represent about 20 percent of the reality of the society."

According to such reasoning -- that the actual figures are some five times higher than the Health Ministry is reporting -- the March 13 official figure of 11,364 people infected would mean there could be some 56,000 coronavirus infections in Iran.

That would make it second in the world after China, which has registered 80,815 cases.

Disparity In Numbers

On March 8, a news site affiliated with Iran's state-controlled television quoted Mohammad Hossein Ghorbani, a Health Ministry official in Gilan Province, one of Iran's worst-hit regions, as saying that 200 people had died from coronavirus just in Gilan.

The same day, a Health Ministry spokesman said the countrywide death toll stood at 194.

Shortly after publishing Ghorbani's comments, which were widely quoted by other media, the Young Journalists Club issued a "correction" that said Ghorbani actually said 21 had died in Gilan from the coronavirus and that the 200 dead included people who had died from other illnesses, including heart and respiratory problems.

That incident follows accusations the government has covered up the extent of the disease's spread in the country amid reports that hospitals and health-care workers have been overwhelmed by the crisis.

On March 9, Kashan Governor Alireza Mortezai said in an interview that in just his city and Aran Bigdol -- both in Isfahan Province -- 88 people had died from the coronavirus and more than 1,000 people had been infected.

The same day, the Health Ministry reported only 601 infections in the entire province of Isfahan. It listed the death toll for the entire country as 237.

Earlier, on February 24, Qom lawmaker Ahmad Amirabadi-Farahani claimed that the death toll from the disease in the holy Shi'ite city he represents was about 50 people -- four times higher than the official number of dead from coronavirus for the entire country.

Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi, who a day later announced he had contracted the coronavirus, insisted the death toll in the country was only 12.

Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group (ICG), said that while Iran's response was catching up with the standard results issued on the coronavirus by the World Health Organization (WHO), "[Iranian officials'] numbers are still unreliable at best, untrue at worst."

"The Islamic republic has institutionalized mendacity in ways that the people no longer trust the government, even if their lives depended on it," Vaez told RFE/RL, adding that "the culture of lies has cultivated widespread cynicism throughout society."

Failure To Quantify

Alaei said in that order to contain the outbreak, Iran needed to improve its data-collection ability and be transparent about the outbreak. "More people need to be tested," he said. "When only about one-fifth of the real cases are being reported, how can the situation be controlled as [many] of those infected don't even know it themselves."

"WHO said it has provided Iran with 100,000 test kits while Russia also announced it will give Iran 50,000 [test kits]," said Alaei, who added that Western countries should provide Iran -- which is facing crippling U.S. economic sanctions -- with more tests.

Prominent analyst Abbas Abdi, one of the Iranian students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in 1979, wrote in a piece published in the reformist Etemad daily this week that the Health Ministry did not want to admit that it doesn't have enough tests. "As a result, they are silent, and they satisfy themselves with releasing the official figures, which they know do not match reality," he said.

The coronavirus outbreak has exacerbated the country's economic woes, prompting a request to the International Monetary Fund for a $5 billion loan to help fight the virus.

On March 9, health officials reportedly issued a directive telling hospitals that all deaths with strong clinical signs of the coronavirus should be registered as definitive fatal cases of the disease. Since then the number of reported deaths has increased.

A tally by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, based on statements by local officials and local news reports, found that since the beginning of the outbreak in Iran until March 9, 927 people had died after contracting the coronavirus.

Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur, who gives daily updates to the media about the crisis, has denied accusations that Tehran has been hiding real figures.

Asked about the inconsistencies between official numbers and figures by local officials, Kianpur said his ministry did not have any reason to cover up the extent of the outbreak in the country, claiming that "misunderstandings" were among the reasons for the discrepancies in numbers.

"But of course we can't consider someone to be infected without testing [them] and having laboratory evidence," he said on March 10.

Link:
Phony Figures? Iran's Coronavirus Outbreak Believed To Be Far More Serious Than Reported - Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty

On Tuesday, March 3, the smartphones of tens of millions of Iranian citizens beeped in unison.

Dear compatriots, before going to the hospital or health center, install and use this software to determine if you or your loved ones have been infected with the coronavirus, said the message, which claimed to come from the Ministry of Health.

It included a link to download the app from an Iranian app store called Cafe Bazaar.

Of course, the app couldn't tell citizens if they had coronavirus. But what it could do is hoover up huge amounts of data on citizens, including names, addresses, dates of birth, and even track people's location in real time.

The government has already boasted that millions of citizens have shared this information with them at a time when most Iranians are completely in the dark about the threat from coronavirus. The government is being accused of covering up the real infection and death rates with experts claiming the real figures are exponentially higher. With confusion and fear gripping many parts of Iran, this app is looking to take advantage of that to boost Tehran's surveillance capabilities.

The regimes survival is intertwined with suppression, surveillance, espionage, and intruding in the most personal affairs of the Iranian people, Shahin Gobadi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, base din Parid, told VICE News. It does not spare any opportunity to intensify its efforts, even at the time of such a major crisis such as coronavirus.

READ: Iran says it only has 500 coronavirus deaths. So why can you see the mass graves from space?

Iran is one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak. On Saturday, officials confirmed that 611 people had died in total, with the country recording 1,365 new infections in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total to more than 12,700.

But public health experts believe that the real death toll is much higher, with some predictions based on a variety of indicators suggesting that the number of infections in Iran could be as high as 2 million.

On Thursday, Gobadis NCR group presented a report from more than 65 Iranian physicians, medical staff, and professionals in the medical field in Europe, North American and Australia to the World Health Organization, claiming that based on its research including interviews with frontline medical workers the death toll was over 3,000.

The report also claims Tehran covered up early cases of the coronavirus in order to boost attendance at an annual march marking the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution on Feb. 11 and local elections on Feb. 21.

READ: Iranian officials keep dying from the coronavirus

But as Irans lawmakers and government officials began to contract the virus and in many cases die, the government sought to quell the growing sense of unease with a new app.

The app is called AC19 and it claims to be able to detect whether or not people are infected, says the coronavirus anti-virus program is designed by the Ministry of Health to detect the likelihood of people having coronavirus.

Once downloaded the app asks users to verify their phone number even though the government has access to all phone numbers via its control of the countrys cell providers. Then users are prompted to give the app permission to send precise location data to the governments servers.

Screen shots of visual prompts from Iran's tracking app AC19, which claims to diagnose coronavirus but actually collects location data.

The problem is that the prompt is part of the Android system and unless users have changed the default setting, the prompt is displayed in English, not Farsi, meaning the vast majority of users wont know what they are being asked.

READ: Iran's answer to the coronavirus outbreak: cut the internet

And for the 40% of Android users in Iran who are using an older version of Android, there will be no prompt at all, meaning their location data is shared without their knowledge.

But one expert who has looked at the apps code says that the location monitoring goes far beyond just finding out where in the country you are located:

Collecting location data is not a one-off thing, Nariman Gharib, an Iranian security researcher living in London, told VICE News, pointing out that the app uses an Android library that is typically used by fitness apps to track your movement. They can actually track you. If you move your device from location A to B, they can actually see that in real-time.

The app itself claims to be able to detect if a user has contracted COVID-19 or not. To do this, it asks a series of YES or NO questions about the symptoms users are experiencing. Once these are answered, users click submit to send your details to the government for assessment.

But instead of having to wait hours or days for a result, the app claims to be able to diagnose you in second, telling you if you are more or less likely to have contracted the disease and whether or not you should go to the hospital.

It is impossible to say how many of Irans citizens have downloaded the app, but according to this tweet from the ICT minister MJ Azari Jahromi, at least 3.5 million people have now shared their precise location and intimate details with the government.

Tehran has in the past shown its willingness to monitor and track the communications of its citizens including restricting and even shutting down internet access in times of crisis.

During the November 2018 uprising in Iran protesters made wide use of the encrypted communication app, Telegram. In the aftermath of the crisis, the regime built its own version of the apps, called Golden Telegram and HotGram, which had up to 30 million users inside Iran.

The apps looked like the official Telegram app, but the company soon issued a warning that the apps were unsafe and the Iranian government could be monitoring all communications.

The company that built the apps for the government back in 2018 was Smart Land Solutions, a company known today as Sarzamin Housmand the same company that produced the coronavirus app.

The development of the app will likely only add to the confusion among citizens in Iran where the regime has kept tight control on information being shared.

On Friday Tehran moved to limit the spread of the coronavirus by announcing that security forces would be clearing all public spaces such as city streets another decision designed to maintain control at all costs.

The regimes attitude is evident during the coronavirus crisis, Gobadi said. Instead of being transparent and alerting the public regarding the real scope of the crisis, the regime has resorted to a massive campaign of deception and concealment particularly as it pertains to the number of victims and fatalities.

Cover: A woman wears a protective mask while using a smartphone as she stands along the side of a street in the Iranian capital Tehran on February 24, 2020. (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)

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Iran Launched an App That Claimed to Diagnose Coronavirus. Instead, It Collected Location Data on Millions of People. - VICE

LONDON The Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary works out of a luminous studio in a leafy corner of southwest London. Her misty abstract paintings evoke the galaxy, the cosmos, the afterlife. To make them, she floods the canvas with water, pours pigment over it and draws tiny marks over the dried surface.

Abstraction is one of the most sophisticated ways of coming to feeling, like a piece of music: You have tone, color, rhythm, so many things that touch you right inside, she said in a recent interview at her studio, where she tiptoed around in striped socks. I really want to get to the core of what I dont know. And what I dont know fascinates me more than what I know, even about myself.

Ms. Houshiary, who moved to London in 1975, is one of a number of Iranian-born artists to have solo exhibitions in the United States this year. Her show at the Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York opens May 1.

Like many of her peers, she left the country around the time of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and settled in the West, as political conditions in Iran made it hard for artists to live and work there. While she steered clear of figuration, other artists in exile have tackled political themes by representing veiled women and religious fervor in their work. Among them is the video artist and photographer Shirin Neshat, who is based in the United States and whose retrospective just ended at the Broad in Los Angeles and opens in February 2021 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. With the animosity between the governments of the United States and Iran now at a peak, these representations are finding a bigger platform in American museums and galleries.

Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad, said in an email that when Ms. Neshats retrospective was in the planning stages, she hoped it would lead to a wider reflection on the history of the United States and Iran as well as on the contemporary immigrant experience. She noted that Ms. Neshat, who now works in New York, was initially based in Los Angeles, a city with the largest population of Iranians outside Iran (half a million Iranians live across the United States), and many shared the artists experience of leaving their country around the time of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The events of that time were seismic and continue to impact global events, yet it is a story not well known by Americans, especially younger Americans.

Ms. Houshiary, who was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1994, moved to London to escape Tehran the colorless capital that her family had moved to and school, where teenage classmates displayed a sudden thirst for revolution that she did not share. She enrolled in art school and became drawn to minimalist sculpture, and in her degree show, she exhibited an enclosure of darkness and light that drew coverage from The Financial Times. Soon afterward, she signed on with Londons Lisson Gallery. Her best-known work to date is a stained-glass window inside a London landmark: the church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, off Trafalgar Square.

The year of the revolution, another future member of Irans artistic diaspora was born in Tehran: Amir H. Fallah, a figurative painter now based in Los Angeles. Because of the political turmoil in Iran, Mr. Fallah had a much more unstable childhood. He grew up at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, when aerial bombings often forced families to take refuge in bunkers stocked with cans of food.

When the family decided to move to Austria, they entrusted their savings to a distant relative who ran off with the money, leaving them stranded for two years in Turkey. We went from middle class to abject poverty overnight, he recalled in a telephone interview.

Settling in Virginia, the family eventually regained its former status. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Fallah started exhibiting in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in 2005. His first large-scale exhibition is at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Ariz., through May 3.

I dont feel 100 percent anything, really, and I feel like Im in a state of limbo, which is fine with me: I think thats where richness lies, he said of his multiple cultural identities. As a dark-skinned Iranian, he said, he suffered racism. A lot of Iranians get a cultural pass because they can pass off as white, but I never had that experience, he said.

His acrylic paintings are decorative and ornate, a bridge between two worlds. For me, its interesting to mash up a detail from a Persian miniature or a Persian rug with a 1980s skateboard graphic, or references to graffiti art or graphic design and pop culture, because thats kind of what I am, he explained.

In his earlier body of work, faces are concealed with a bandanna or a scarf. When you cant see somebodys physical features, then you have to focus on the other things around them, he said. It goes back to my own identity. People are always misreading me because Im dark-skinned. Thats kind of where this comes out of.

Mr. Fallah said the art world was focused on areas its been neglecting, such as African-American and Latino artists, and some of that does trickle down to Iranian artists. But honestly, I havent seen a big boom.

In the international auction world, prices of Iranian modern and contemporary art are not comparable to their Western counterparts. The most expensive work by a living Iranian artist is Parviz Tanavolis bronze sculpture The Wall (Oh Persepolis) (1975), which sold in 2008 for $2.84 million. Other modern artists popular with collectors include Monir Farmanfarmaian, Siah Armajani (who had a show at the Met Breuer last year) and modern masters such as Bahman Mohassess and Leyly Matine-Daftary.

Roxane Zand, Sothebys deputy chairman of the Middle East and Gulf region, said that the early 2000s brought a sudden attention toward Iranian art but that the 2008 global financial crisis led to a market correction. The situation today is more normalized, she said.

She noted a growing gap between artists of the diaspora and those living in Iran, where economic hardship, sanctions and a collapsing currency mean that artists are unable to buy colors or canvases, or to have their work exhibited by Tehran-based gallerists at international fairs.

The Iranian-born collector Mohammed Afkhami who will exhibit works from his collection of contemporary Iranian art at New Yorks Asia Society in October said that when he started making acquisitions in 2005, Iranian art collecting was an exclusively Iranian affair among Iranians.

Today, Iranian artists are represented by top international galleries, and they are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the British Museum and the Pompidou Center, he said. Yet, we are still in the early stages of that diversification away from purely Iranian patronage, he added.

Read more:
As Tensions Rise With Iran, So Does Interest in Art It Inspired - The New York Times

The official COVlD-19 death toll in Iran has risen to 237 people today as the U.S.-Iranian diplomatic standoff continues to slow down international cooperation to fight the new coronavirus disease.

The Trump administration quietly loosened sanctions on the Iranian banking system to allow for humanitarian trade and offered the Iranian government help in dealing with COVID-19 at the end of February. But the diplomatic breakthrough was short-lived, as Iran has rejected the U.S. offer and U.S. sanctions continue to throw up obstacles in the path of Irans pandemic response.

The restrictions on the central bank imposed in September had created tremendous uncertainty for companies that relied on [humanitarian exemptions] for the export of food, agricultural commodities, medicines, or medical devices to Iran, the law firm Hogan Lovells explained in a March 5 memo to its clients, so the Trump administrations measures indicate an effort on the part of the U.S. Government to facilitate humanitarian trade with Iran.

Its not like theyre doing nothing, explained sanctions lawyer Erich Ferrari, but a lot of this is [the Trump administrations] own doing. Theyre trying to reduce the negative effects of their own actions.

On February 27, the U.S. Treasury had loosened U.S. legal restrictions on the Central Bank of Iran, which had prevented Iran from importing coronavirus test kits and other medicines and medical devices. The next day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered direct assistance to the Iranian government.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi denounced Pompeos offer of direct support, calling it a ridiculous claim and a political and psychological play and condemning U.S. economic terrorism in a March 2 interview with the state-run Mehr News Agency.

We hope that the government of Iran will heed our offers of humanitarian assistance and medical supplies, Pompeo reiterated to reporters on Friday. But a State Department spokesperson confirmed to the National Interest on Monday that Iran has turned down the U.S. offer of assistance both publicly and privately.

But the humanitarian exemption continues to exclude certain goods. Suppliers need a license to sell certain medical devices, including full-face respirators and certain decontamination systems. It took the U.S. Treasury an average of 77 days to approve and 177 days to deny a license for medical devices, according to statistics released for last year.

The National Interest asked Brian Hook, the State Department official in charge of Iranian affairs, on February 28 whether the Trump administration would consider expanding the humanitarian exemptions to include medical devices like respirators and decontamination equipment.

I think that what you described is something that we will be taking a hard look at, he responded at the briefing, hosted by Al Monitor. We are looking at what we can do, but the president right now is focused very much on the American people, but we can do two things at the same time. Were looking at what we can do to help.

We have no new policy announcements at this time, a State Department spokesperson told the National Interest on Monday.

Ferrari added that the U.S. Treasurys guidance to the public is just pointing them to a bunch of regulations, and said that the Trump administration could make it more clear what kind of business with Iran is allowed.

When you actually get into the details of compliance, it is still a minefield, said Peter Harrell, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who specializes in sanctions law.

If youre selling $75 million of medical supplies, its worth navigating the minefield, he added.For smaller transactions, it can make it uneconomical.

U.S. sanctions law also categorically bans selling medical devices to the Iranian military and police. Harrell emphasizes that this is a balanced approach because government-run civilian hospitals are still exempt from the sanctions.

But the Iranian military has muscled its way to the front lines of the coronavirus response, and the ban on selling to security forces imposes enhanced due diligence requirements on exporters, according to the Hogan Lovells memo.

The biggest issue is not so much whether or not sanctions are in the immediate term making it impossible for Irans public health sector to respond to the virus, said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder and publisher of Bourse & Bazaar, an organization that tracks developments in Irans economy.

Batmanghelidj said that pre-existing stocks of medical goods should be enough in the short-term but that Iran could run into shortages if the epidemic continues for a long period of time.

The situation inside Iran is currently worseningand officials have hinted that the true death toll of the pandemic is far greater than the official number.

Iranian officials announced two new measures on Monday to slow the spread of COVID-19. The judiciary announced that it would be furloughing seventy thousand prisoners. Irans religious head Ayatollah Ali Khamenei canceled his plans to address the nation on Irans spring solstice holiday, which is also New Years Day for Iranians.

Iranian health ministry official Mohammad Hossein Qorbani told reporters on Sunday that over two hundred people had died of COVID-19 in the northern province of Gilan, greater than the total nationwide death toll published earlier that day.

I didnt say that all these deaths were because of the coronavirus, he added, amidst accusations of a coverup. It is possible that many of these individuals had underlying respiratory illnesses.

Video shared on social media showed a crowd of locals that day setting up an impromptu checkpoint in Mazandaran, another northern province, aimed at keeping tourists out of the coastal region.

Ahmad Lashaki, a member of parliament from Mazandaran, was caught on tape begging Iranian presidential advisor Mahmud Vaezi to quarantine the province.

The people of Mazandaran are being annihilated. They are closing the roads, he said. Please, close the paths for one week until the situation becomes stable and normal.

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @Matthew_Petti.

Image: Reuters

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Coronavirus: The Deadly New U.S.-Iran Standoff - The National Interest