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Iran reported the first deaths in Qum two days before the parliamentary elections. The trust in the government was low after its brutal suppression of the protests in November and its cover-up of the accidental shooting-down of a Ukrainian jetliner in the aftermath of Gen. Qassim Suleimanis assassination.

A high turnout in the elections would help improve the legitimacy of the government. Tehran seems to have suppressed information about the coronavirus because it did not want participation in the elections to be affected.

Although the hard-liners won the elections, voting was the lowest since 1979. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused the countrys enemies of exaggerating the threat of the coronavirus right before the elections to keep voters away from the polls.

Iran could have minimized the outbreak by moving swiftly to quarantine Qum, which is very crowded and heavily infected, but it did not. Some measures have now been taken. For instance, subway cars in Tehran have been disinfected, schools across the country are closed and Friday Prayer services are canceled in most provinces.

The authorities must immediately get relatives of all the infected and the deceased tested. They must put out truthful, transparent numbers and make assessments based on those numbers, enhance protections for health care workers and target the most affected areas. Qum must be quarantined.

Western countries in collaboration with the World Health Organization and other international institutions must take the lead on global medical diplomacy and do more to provide testing kits to Iran. The United States must overcome its belligerent posture toward Iran, provide the medical and technical support that could save lives and ease the difficulties American and European companies face in supplying medicines and medical equipment to Iran.

The most important lesson of the coronavirus crisis in Iran is that health policy must never be politicized, especially in terms of emergency medical response.

Kamiar Alaei and Arash Alaei are Iranian health-policy experts and the co-presidents of the Institute for International Health and Education in Albany, N.Y.

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How Iran Completely and Utterly Botched Its Response to the Coronavirus - The New York Times