Iran official announced that they will temporarily release 54,000 people from prisons and deploy hundreds of thousands of health workers to contain the deadly Coronavirus outbreak in the country as the death toll rose to 92. Recent reports revealed that the Novel Coronavirus has infected over 2,900 people in the Middle East country.
While Iran said that 586 new cases were reported overnight, the country has come under pressure to take more action against COVID-19 outbreak after Iraq, Kuwait, UAE and Bahrain reported cases with links to the Iranian city of Qom, where several holy sites are regularly visited by hundreds of pilgrims.
But recently shared video showed an extremely different site of the healthcare sector in Iran as health workers revealed that "We don't even have standard work attire to protect us." Now the question is if they can't protect themselves then how they will treat the Coronavirus patients at hospitals in Iran?
What is happening in Iran?
On Wednesday, an Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad tweeted a video and wrote, "The #CoronaVirus has now killed hundreds in Iran. By covering it up initially, the government is directly responsible for the deaths."
The video featured health workers at a hospital in Iran who have explained the current scenario in Iran. One nurse was heard saying that "When the staff compromised their own life by coming here, we need to have better tools. Unfortunately, we don't have enough to work with."
One of the nurses then showed what she currently wears at work, is not enough to prevent the new Coronavirus. She showed her leg and mentioned that "What I am wearing is not the right attire at all." In addition, she mentioned that "We need to an abundance of standard attire."
The nurse claimed that during her shift he has to communicate with Novel Coronavirus patients at the health centre in Iran to give them masks and gloves and in that they need to have a lot of disinfectants. The unnamed nurse then revealed that "When I keep on asking for that, then there is a problem."
Shortage of products at health centre
In the new video, the nurse mentioned that there is a shortage of proper hospital attire and hygiene products. When a man asked her for surgical caps, she could not give it to him as they don't have the stock of such caps.
She said, "We also need to have enough drugs... especially for this disease," but they also don't have that.
After this video was shared on social media many netizens questioned and criticized the Iranian government. While one Twitter user asked "What did they [government] do with the $180,000,000,000?," another user said "The Iranian government spends money on wars. Not on the well being of its people."
A Twitter user also replied to Masih Alinejad's Tweet stating that "another risk factor was religious tourism in Kum and Mashhad. Friday prayers etc. I assume that high death rate in Iran is the result of false statistics. A lot of infected people are not included in Covid-19 statistics just because of absence of proper testing."
