Iran on Sunday announced its highest single-day death toll from the COVID-19 with 251 confirmed dead, the same day local media reported two senior officials had been infected and the nation’s currency plunged to its lowest level ever.
Health Ministry spokesperson Sima Sadat Lari said the total confirmed death toll now stands at 28,544, making Iran the hardest-hit country in the region. Iran had just recently recorded its highest daily death toll four days earlier with 239 new fatalities.
A further 3,822 new cases were confirmed over the past 24 hour-period, raising recorded nationwide cases to 500,075. Nearly 4,500 patients are in critical condition.
The semiofficial Tasnim news agency said Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also a vice-president of Iran, had confirmed positive for the virus last week and has been in home quarantine since. The news agency reported that his health condition is currently good.
A separate report by the news agency said the country’s vice-president in charge of budget and planning, Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, had also tested positive for the coronavirus.
Iran has struggled to contain the spread of the virus across this nation of 80 million people, initially beating it back only to see a spike in cases again, beginning in June. The government has largely resisted imposing wide-scale lockdowns as the economy teeters from continued U.S. economic sanctions that effectively bar Iran from selling its oil internationally.
Money exchange shops in Tehran sold the U.S. dollar at 315,000 rials on Sunday, compared to what was 32,000 rials to the dollar at the time of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Salehi is known internationally as one of the key Iranian negotiators who took part in those nuclear talks. The deal curbed Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief, but President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed crushing economic sanctions.
The currency plummeted further on Sunday after the Trump administration’s decision on Thursday to blacklist 18 Iranian banks that had so far escaped the bulk of re-imposed sanctions. The move subjects non-Iranian financial institutions to penalties for doing business with them, effectively cutting the banks off from the international financial system.
Iran has also seen several top officials contract the virus over past months, including senior Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri and Vice-President Massoumeh Ebtekar.
A number of Cabinet ministers have also tested positive, including Tourism Minister Ali Asghar Mounesan and the former Industry Minister Reza Rahmani.
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