The coronavirus has killed nearly 3 times more people in Iran than the government has admitted, according to leaked data, fueling suspicions of a planned cover-up in the Islamic Republic.
Officially, Iran’s Ministry of Health says 14,405 more people died from COVID-19 until 20 July, the recent highest date in documents leaked to the BBC. But the data, which involve the main points of hospital admissions, show that only about 42,000 more people died from coronavirus symptoms to that date.
Similarly, although official Iranian figures mean that another 279,000 people have become inflamed with the virus, the leaked documents show 451,000 infections.
According to Johns Hopkins University’s account, the highest death toll would make Iran the fifth most affected country in the world, after the UNITED States, Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Iran, the most affected country in the Middle East, has been accused of lying about the true record of coronavirus in its population. Since the beginning of the epidemic, local officials have denounced obvious discrepancies in official figures; In February, lawmaker Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani accused officials of lying about the scale of the epidemic, saying there were only 50 deaths in the city of Qom, while the regime said there were only 12 other people across the country.
In March, satellite photographs revealed mass burial pits excavated in Qom, the initial epicentre of the epidemic in Iran, and a World Health Organization official, Rick Brennan, told Reuters that the actual number of cases in Iran may be five times higher than the government reported.
READ: The mass burial sites of Iranian coronavirus can be seen from space
Sanam Vakil, lead investigator of Chatham House’s foreign affairs tank, told VICE News that the leak gave more credence to what observers had been saying for some time about the Iranian government’s official speech on the pandemic.
“I daresay there was a planned attempt to minimize value,” he said. “The regime is a matter of tensions … and his failure to appear in a physical crisis, with so many loss of life, would be the icing on the cake of his declining credibility. They don’t need to see new riots in the country. »
She said many Iranians have been skeptical since the outbreak began on the official account of the virus’s impact. “I think the average maximum average of Iranians would be skeptical about the numbers because they are going straight through this crisis and everyone knows someone who has been affected.”
The BBC said knowledge had leaked through an anonymous source that said it had shared the documents to “clarify the truth.” The news firm said that the main points in the documents, which included the main points of identification of patients, as well as their symptoms and the duration of their hospital remain, were verified when cross-references were made with the main points of cases in which they already contained information.
Vakil said that the fact that knowledge leaked to a foreign outlet inside Iran showed a transparent preference from within the country for the government to say the fact about the epidemic. But he added that while the leak may lead to greater demands for accountability from Iran’s leaders, he did not expect it to pose a serious challenge to the authoritarian regime.
“I can’t believe there’s some kind of commission, or other people will really be responsible,” he said.