Originally published 2020-03-20. Dates, ages and announcements in this article refer to March 2020.
On 19 March 2020, the eve of the Persian New Year, Iran's health ministry put the country's coronavirus crisis into terms anyone could picture. Spokesman Kianush Jahanpur wrote on Twitter that, based on the latest data, roughly 50 people in Iran were catching COVID-19 every hour and one person was dying about every ten minutes. Official totals that day stood at 18,407 confirmed cases and 1,284 deaths, 149 of them in the previous 24 hours, making Iran the worst-hit country in the Middle East at the time.
The tweet was a public-health warning aimed at Nowruz travel, and it arrived in the middle of a bitter argument about whether US sanctions were making Iran's outbreak worse. This page explains what the numbers meant, why the timing mattered and what the sanctions debate was about.
The tweet and what it said
Jahanpur posted in Persian. The first part gave the hourly and ten-minute figures; the second asked Iranians to keep that information in mind and make careful decisions about travel, movement and the family visits that are central to Nowruz celebrations.
مطابق آخرین داده ها، تقریبا هر ساعت، ۵۰ نفر در ایران به #کووید_۱۹ مبتلا می شوند و ایضا هر ده دقیقه، یکنفر جان خود را در اثر پیامدهای ناشی از ابتلا به #کرونا از دست می دهد.
— Kianush Jahanpur (@drjahanpur) March 19, 2020
با لحاظ این اطلاعات در مورد سفر، تردد، جابجایی و دید و بازدید نوروزی و ... آگاهانه تصمیم بگیرید ...
In English, the core message reads roughly: according to the latest data, almost every hour 50 people in Iran are infected with COVID-19, and every ten minutes someone dies from the effects of the virus.
Checking the arithmetic
The rates were a way of turning daily totals into something vivid, and they match the official figures reasonably well:
- 149 deaths in 24 hours works out to just over six deaths an hour, or about one every ten minutes.
- Iran reported 1,046 new confirmed cases that day, which is a little over 40 an hour, so "almost 50" was a rounded-up version.
Two cautions apply. First, these were averages over a reporting period; infections and deaths did not arrive on a neat schedule. Second, confirmed cases depend on how many people are tested, and in early 2020 testing in Iran, as in most countries, was limited. Iranian researchers and outside analysts later suggested that both cases and deaths were undercounted in the early months, and a report from the Iranian parliament's own research centre in April 2020 reportedly estimated that the real toll could be considerably higher than the official one.
How Iran's outbreak unfolded
Iran announced its first confirmed cases, and its first deaths, in the religious city of Qom on 19 February 2020. Within weeks the virus had spread to every province, and several senior figures were infected, including a deputy health minister and a vice-president. The speed surprised many observers and fuelled criticism that the government had been slow to restrict gatherings and pilgrimages.
By mid-March, hospitals in the worst-affected areas were under heavy pressure, and satellite images showed newly dug burial trenches at a cemetery in Qom, which we reported on in a separate piece about mass burial pits visible from space. The government urged people to stay home, closed schools and universities, and asked citizens to cancel Nowruz trips and visits, the most important holiday period of the Iranian year.
The sanctions debate
The outbreak hit an economy already squeezed by US sanctions, which Washington had reimposed and expanded after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018. Officially, food, medicine and medical equipment were exempt. In practice, banks and suppliers often avoided any transaction involving Iran for fear of penalties, and human-rights groups had warned in 2019 that this made it harder for Iranians to obtain some medicines.
In March 2020 Iran asked the International Monetary Fund for a 5 billion dollar emergency loan, its first request for IMF financing since the 1960s, and called for sanctions to be lifted. China, Russia and a number of humanitarian organisations backed calls for relief, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged governments to waive sanctions that could hamper countries' pandemic response. The United States kept its sanctions in place, saying humanitarian trade was already allowed, and reportedly added new designations during the same weeks. US officials also offered assistance, which Iran's leadership rejected.
Both sides of that argument contain real points. Sanctions did complicate Iran's ability to pay for and import supplies, and they weakened the wider economy that funds a health system. At the same time, many of the decisions that shaped the early outbreak, from testing to travel restrictions, were made in Tehran. It is fair to say that sanctions made the response harder; it is not possible to say from this snapshot how much of the death toll they caused.
Why the Nowruz timing mattered
Nowruz, which fell on 20 March in 2020, is a time when millions of Iranians travel across the country to visit relatives, often older ones. Public-health experts feared exactly the kind of mixing between generations and regions that spreads a respiratory virus fastest. Jahanpur's tweet should be read in that light: the dramatic rates were meant to persuade people to stay home over the holiday, not to describe a fixed timetable of infections and deaths.
Looking back
Iran went through several further waves of COVID-19 over the following two years, and by official count more than 140,000 people died, among the highest totals in the region. The March 2020 figures were an early marker in that story. They show how quickly an outbreak can grow before testing catches up, why clear public messages matter before big holidays, and why sanctions policy and humanitarian needs collide so sharply in a health emergency.
For a wider picture of how the early pandemic was tracked, see our page on the early COVID-19 dashboard. If you have health concerns of your own, talk to a doctor.
Sources: Kianush Jahanpur on Twitter, 19 March 2020; Gulf News / Reuters: Iran's death toll rises to 1,284; The New Arab: one death every ten minutes; Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in Iran; PBS NewsHour / AP: Iran asks for billions in loans as virus death toll climbs; The Nation: Iran turns to the IMF for the first time in decades; KFF: Iran calls for end to US sanctions and seeks IMF loans.
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