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“The color classification doesn’t make sense anymore. We no longer have orange and yellow, the whole country is red,” Harirchi said in a televised interview in the northwestern city of Tabriz on Thursday.

Iran has been divided up into white, orange/yellow and red regions based on the number of infections and deaths.

Harirchi warned that if this trend continues, the death toll from the coronavirus will reach 45,000 in Iran – the worst-hit country from the virus in West Asia, according to IRNA.

He said that the number of hospitalizations in Tabriz, for instance, has reached 160 from under 40 in a day and the hospitalizations have increased from 10 to 160 in the central city of Qom.

On Tuesday, Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raeisi said that the number of people testing positive for the novel coronavirus doubled in the capital Tehran just in one week.

Health Ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari said that the number of new positive cases in the country rose by 3,049, to 416,198, from Thursday to Friday.

He noted that 1,593 of the newly-infected people have been hospitalized.

Among those undergoing treatment in medical centers at present, 3,869 coronavirus patients are in critical condition due to more severe infections, Lari noted.

At least 355,505 patients have recovered from the coronavirus infection so far, or have been discharged from hospitals across Iran, the spokeswoman said.

The ministry’s spokeswoman also put the death toll from the virus at 23,952 following the death of 144 patients from Thursday to Friday.

She said that 3,691,399 coronavirus diagnostic tests have been carried out in Iran so far.

Iran has been trying to contain the spread of the virus by enforcing social distancing measures and making face masks mandatory in public places since the outbreak of the virus in the country in February.

But, recent holidays in the country, during which many people traveled to other cities, led to the increase of new cases in the country.

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Seven cases have so far been linked to the Xinfadi meat market, six of them confirmed on Saturday, officials said. Nine nearby schools and kindergartens have been closed, AFP reported.

Meanwhile, China has mobilized its army and fast-tracked tests in the global race to find a coronavirus vaccine, but its labs also have an image tarnished by past health scandals to overcome.

Six months after the first cases emerged in the city of Wuhan, China has moved quickly to develop a vaccine and is involved in several of the dozen or so international clinical trials currently underway.

Researchers have reported promising early results from tests on humans and monkeys, and authorities hope to have the first shots ready for the public this year.

The Military Academy of Medical Sciences is among those working on a vaccine, in partnership with a pharmaceutical firm.

China has authorized fast-track procedures, allowing preclinical phases – such as animal tests and other studies – to be conducted at the same time instead of one after the other.

But Ding Sheng, dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, sounded a note of caution around using “non-conventional methods”.

“I understand that people are eagerly waiting for a vaccine,” Ding said in the People’s Daily, a Communist Party organ.

“But on a scientific point of view, we can’t lower our criteria, even in an emergency,” he said.

Ding also questioned the decision to authorize phase one and two clinical trials at the same time, allowing labs to avoid having to seek authorization before proceeding from one to the other.

Nick Jackson, of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), however, pointed out that China was not the only country to do this.

“Many organizations globally are conducting adaptive trials that allow for rapid transition from phase one to two studies,” said Jackson, whose organization funds research into vaccines.

“This approach is necessary given the urgent need for vaccines.”

One pharmaceutical company, Sinopharm, said its vaccine could be ready for the public at the end of the year or early 2021.

The head of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention hopes a vaccine could be ready as early as September for priority cases, such as health workers.

But China will also have to convince the public that any vaccine it produces are safe as the country’s pharmaceutical industry has been hit by scandals involving tainted medicine and corruption in recent years.

Parents have held protests and some are scared enough to seek foreign-made vaccines for their children over those made in China.

One of the biggest scandals involved Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology, which was fined a record $1.3 billion in 2018 after it fabricated records for a rabies vaccine for humans.

The same company had also produced a vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough (DPT) that was administered to more than 200,000 children and caused paralysis in a few cases.

One of the companies involved in the search for a vaccine against the novel coronavirus was implicated in the scandal.

The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, from the city where the virus first emerged late last year, produced 400,000 doses of DPT that “did not meet the norms”, according to drug regulators.

The government responded by enacting legislation to tighten oversight and prevent defective shots from entering the market.

“The government is very careful in reviewing the vaccine applications,” said Lung-Ji Chang, the American president of the Geno-Immune Medical Institute in Shenzhen, southern China, which is also working on a coronavirus vaccine.

But several other cases have been reported by Chinese media in the past year, including fake vaccines in a southern hospital and children getting shots for the wrong illness in northern Hebei province.

“This does not mean (China) does not have the capability to produce a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in the United States.

He noted that China now has tougher laws, vaccines recognized by the World Health Organization, and more money invested in research and development.

In a show of confidence, a general and senior staff at Sinopharm were injected with a candidate coronavirus vaccine currently under development.

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India joined the ranks of Britain and other countries clamping down to hold back the virus as business activity collapsed from Japan to the United States at a record pace in March.

The highly contagious coronavirus has caused entire regions to be placed on lockdown. In some places soldiers are patrolling the streets to keep consumers and workers indoors, halting services and production and breaking supply chains.

“The global health crisis is rapidly morphing into a global recession, as there is a clear tension between preventing infections and ruining the economy,” said Edoardo Campanella, an economist at UniCredit Bank in Milan.

But Wall Street bounced from three-year lows as investors pin their hopes on the U.S. Senate passing a $2 trillion stimulus bill.

Confirmed coronavirus cases around the world exceeded 377,000 across 194 countries and territories as of early Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, more than 16,500 of them fatal.

In Geneva, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said infections in the United States had greatly increased.

Over the previous 24 hours, 85 percent of new cases were in Europe and the United States, and of those, 40 percent were in the United States.

As of Monday, the virus had infected more than 42,000 people there, killing at least 559.

Asked whether the United States could become the new epicenter, Harris said: “We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the U.S. So it does have that potential.”

Some U.S. state and local officials have decried a lack of coordinated federal action, saying that having localities act on their own has put them in competition for supplies.

President Donald Trump acknowledged the difficulty.

“The World Market for face masks and ventilators is Crazy. We are helping the states to get equipment, but it is not easy,” he tweeted.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday the government would impose a nationwide lockdown from midnight for 21 days.

Health researchers have warned that more than a million people in India could be infected with the coronavirus by mid-May, prompting the government to shut down all air and train travel, businesses and schools.

On Tuesday, Modi, leader of the world’s biggest democracy, went further, saying nobody would be allowed to leave their homes.

“The only way to save ourselves from coronavirus is if we don’t leave our homes, whatever happens, we stay at home,” Modi said.

India has so far reported 482 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and nine deaths.

OLYMPIC ORGANIZERS GIVE IN

Olympic Games organizers and the Japanese government had clung to the hope that the world’s biggest sporting event could go ahead but finally bowed to the inevitable to make Tokyo 2020 the latest and biggest victim of a ravaged sporting calendar.

After a call with International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the July 24-Aug. 9 event would be rescheduled for the summer of 2021 at the latest – as proof of victory over the coronavirus.

“President Bach said he is in agreement, 100%.”

It was the first time in the Olympics’ 124-year history that they had been postponed, though they were canceled outright three times during the two 20th-century world wars.

Of the top 10 countries by case numbers, Italy has reported the highest fatality rate, at around 10%, which at least partly reflects its older population. The fatality rate globally – the ratio of deaths to confirmed infections – is around 4.3%, though national figures can vary widely according to how much testing is done.

Britain, believed by experts to be about two weeks behind Italy in the outbreak cycle, on Tuesday began curbs on movement without precedent in peacetime after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the country to stay at home.

The streets of the capital were quiet as all but essential shops closed and people only went to work if it was unavoidable.

Johnson had resisted pressure to impose a full lockdown even as other European countries had done so, but was forced to change tack as projections showed the health system could become overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, China’s Hubei province, the original center of the outbreak, will lift curbs on people leaving the area, but other regions will tighten controls as new cases double due to imported infections.

The provincial capital Wuhan, which has been in total lockdown since Jan. 23, will lift its travel restrictions on April 8.

However, the risk from overseas infections appears to be on the rise, prompting tougher screening and quarantine measures in cities such as the capital Beijing.

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In an interview with Tasnim in the southeastern city of Kerman, Chairman of the Parliament’s Education and Research Commission Mohammad Mahdi Zahedi said the idea of holding summer classes at schools will be discussed with the Education Minister of Iran as soon as the Parliament reopens.

Keeping the schools open in the summertime will be definitely pursued if the Parliament and the Education Ministry come to the conclusion that it will be necessary to make up for the missed classes, he said.

The MP also hailed the Education Ministry and the Science Ministry’s idea of distance education and offering videoconferencing classes with the help of the state TV, saying such distance learning courses are necessary in the current circumstances, although they might be short of the necessary quality.

He expressed hope that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Iran would be deemed as an opportunity to elevate the level of the country’s educational system.

Last week, the Iranian administration extended the closure of all schools and universities nationwide until the end of the current Iranian year (March 19) as the country is struggling with the outbreak of COVID-19.

The educational centers in Iran will be closed for another two weeks afterward during the Iranian New Year holidays.

The university entrance exams for the master of science and Ph.D. degrees have also been postponed.

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Iran health minister, Saeed Namaki on Monday sent a letter to the Health Ministry’s department of research and technology, urging that the researchers in all medical universities across the country should carry out medical research on COVID-19.

The minister asked the academic research teams to focus on various issues relating to the novel coronavirus, such as the contagion rate, demographic factors, efficiency of medication therapy, detection of the main sources of infection, treatment strategies, the behavior of COVID-19 and possible mutation of the virus, and effects of social behavior on the spread of the disease.

Namaki said the results of such research programs will help the medical society adapt and revise the practical plans in the fight against the new coronavirus.

The Health Ministry announced on Monday that the number of people who have died from the coronavirus in Iran has risen to 237 and the total number of confirmed cases to 7,161. At least 2,394 people have recovered from the disease in the country so far.

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“The release of the prisoners amid coronavirus outbreak should continue to the point where it doesn’t cause insecurity in society,” Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raeisi told a meeting of judicial authorities.

“Priority goes to those who have underlying health conditions,” he added.

MIZAN

Raeisi said Iran’s judicial apparatus has also prioritized processing the cases of individuals accused of hoarding hygiene products and other medical requirements amid the country’s efforts to curb the epidemic.

“The hoarders will be tried earlier than they are due in open courts, and the hoarded items will soon be distributed throughout the nation,” he said.

43 deaths confirmed

The outbreak of the coronavirus in Iran is one of the deadliest outside China, where the disease originated.

The Health Ministry on Monday reported 43 new deaths from the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours, bringing the overall toll to 237 dead.

“Our colleagues have confirmed 595 new cases across the country,” Kianoush Jahanpour, the Health Ministry’s spokesman said in a televised conference.

“This brings the overall number of confirmed cases to 7,161 as of today noon,” he added.

Jahanpour said the rate of new infections was dropping but added “it is still too early to judge” when the outbreak could be brought under control.

“Forty-three people have unfortunately been added to the number of those who have died of the disease, so to date there are 237 dead.”

“So far, 2,394 of the confirmed cases have recovered,” Jahanpour added.

With 1,945 cases, Tehran remains the province with the highest number of cases, according to the official.

The second worst-hit province with 712 confirmed cases in Qom, the Shia pilgrimage city south of the capital Tehran where the first cases were reported.

Indigenous testing kits

Separately, an Iranian official said the country’s science-based organizations have managed to produce indigenous diagnostic kits, which will be supplied to the market as of March 20.

Mostafa Qanei, the secretary of the Biotechnological Development Center of the Science and Technology Department of the Presidential Office, said diagnosis is the most important first step in treating the coronavirus patients.

The devices are being produced to meet domestic demand because the kits that have been supplied by China, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF – the United Nations’ children fund – and those which the country has imported would last out only two months, he said.

 AFP, Reuters and Press TV contributed to this story.

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