Originally published 2020-03-17.
In March 2020, commercial satellite pictures of a cemetery in the Iranian city of Qom showed two freshly dug trenches, each roughly 90 metres (about 100 yards) long, next to a large pile of lime. Iranian health officials said the lime was being used for coronavirus victims. The images became one of the clearest early signs that Iran’s official COVID-19 death count was far too low.
What the satellite pictures showed
The images came from Maxar Technologies, the Colorado company that operates the WorldView satellites. The key frame, taken on 1 March 2020, shows the Behesht-e Masoumeh cemetery on the edge of Qom. Two long, parallel trenches had been cut into a previously empty part of the grounds. Earlier imagery of the same plot showed bare ground, so the digging was new.
The Washington Post published the analysis in mid-March, and Live Science and other outlets followed. A Maxar imagery analyst pointed out a large mound of white material beside the trenches. That turned out to be lime, a substance used for centuries to control odour and slow decay when many bodies must be buried quickly.
Each trench was a little shorter than an American football field is wide. That is long enough for a large number of graves laid side by side, which is why the pictures alarmed people watching the outbreak from outside Iran.
Why Qom mattered
Qom is a major centre of Shia learning and pilgrimage, about 125 kilometres south of Tehran. Its shrine of Fatima Masumeh draws visitors from across Iran and from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Lebanon. That steady flow of pilgrims made the city an ideal place for a respiratory virus to spread and then travel.
Iran announced its first two cases in Qom on 19 February 2020, and the health ministry said the same day that both patients had died. Reporting deaths at the same moment as the first infections was a strong hint that the virus had been circulating unnoticed for weeks. Local authorities said on 25 February that they would prepare more graves.
The outbreak quickly reached the top of the state. Deputy health minister Iraj Harirchi tested positive in late February, as did vice-president Masoumeh Ebtekar. By early March, 23 members of parliament were infected, and several senior figures, including an adviser to the Supreme Leader, died.
Official numbers versus the evidence
When the images circulated, Iran had reported a little over 11,000 cases and about 500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data cited at the time. Within a few days the official toll passed 700, and by 19 March it stood at 1,284 deaths among 18,407 confirmed cases.
Many observers doubted those figures. Physicians told the American journalist Dexter Filkins that hospital managers had ordered staff not to release infection and death statistics. A World Health Organization official suggested that limited testing meant only about a fifth of real cases were being counted. Later in 2020, leaked data indicated around 42,000 deaths with COVID-19 symptoms by 20 July, when the official figure was 14,405.
By July 2023 Iran’s official tally stood at about 146,800 deaths. An excess-mortality model by The Economist put the true toll at roughly 270,000 by early 2022, nearly double the reported number at the time.
What the pictures can and cannot prove
Satellite images are powerful, but they have limits. They show that digging took place, where, when and roughly how much. They cannot show how many people were buried, who they were, or what they died of.
Some of the speed may also reflect custom. Islamic practice calls for burial soon after death, often within 24 hours. The Iranian news site Tabnak reported that authorities had decided to bury all virus victims in one area for sanitary reasons, with cold storage used until burial. A single dedicated section with pre-dug trenches fits that plan, and does not on its own mean bodies were being hidden.
The fair reading is this: the trenches showed that Qom officials were preparing for far more deaths than the national figures suggested. Combined with testimony from doctors and families, that made the early official count very hard to believe.
Social media posts in March 2020 also claimed that a man had been arrested for filming bodies in a Qom morgue. That report could not be confirmed independently, so it is best treated with caution.
How families experienced the burials
The human side came through in personal accounts. Ramtin Arablouei, host of NPR’s history podcast Throughline, wrote that his uncle in Iran died of the virus and that relatives had to watch the burial from about 100 metres away while men in protective suits handled the body. Traditional washing of the body and gatherings of mourners, central to Iranian funerals, were largely impossible.
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, shared local reports explaining that the trenches were dug so the many dying could be buried quickly. He called the images “sobering”.
Why satellite evidence became part of pandemic reporting
Iran was not the only place where images from space told part of the story. Commercial satellites, once rare, now photograph much of the planet several times a day. Journalists used them during the pandemic to track hospital construction in Wuhan, new graves in Iran and Brazil, and later mass burials elsewhere.
For readers, a few simple questions help when such images appear in the news:
- Is there a dated “before” image showing the site empty?
- Who supplied and analysed the pictures, and do they say what they cannot see?
- Do independent sources on the ground, such as doctors, families or local media, point the same way?
In Qom’s case the answer to all three was yes, which is why the pictures carried so much weight. They did not replace careful counting, but they made it clear that careful counting was not happening yet. You can read more about Iran’s early outbreak in our article on early COVID-19 detection and treatment funding.
Sources: Live Science, 13 March 2020: satellite images of new graves in Qom; Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in Iran; The Washington Post, March 2020: Iran coronavirus outbreak graves (original satellite analysis).
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