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Iran officially reported its first COVID-19 affected person on 19th February,2020 in Qom. Iran’s present update on confirmed cases at 32,332 while there have been 2,378 deaths, the highest toll of any country in the Middle-East (as of 28th March, 2020).
India Times on 27th March, 2020 reported that a health worker in a hazmat suit and mask while standing over the still body of an incubated 5-year old boy wearing nothing but a plastic diaper was seen asking the public to stop drinking industrial alcohol over fears about the virus. The boy stood blind after his parents fed him toxic methanol falling victim to the mistaken belief that it protects/prevents the spread of the virus. He is one of the many reported victims to this false belief.
Iran has already been on the higher end of the spectrum when compared to other counties in its rate of increasingly affected people growing by the day and is now coming to grips with an alcohol poisoning problem. As of today, 480 people have been reported to have died of alcohol poisoning while 2,850 of people stand affected. Alcohol consumption is banned throughout the Iranian Republic which has made the public rely on bootleggers who use methanol with a splash of bleach instead of ethanol, which is falsely advertised to be consumable, making it far more dangerous. The fear of the virus combined with ignorant rumours has given rise to a pressing problem, which has caused the death of people unaffected by the virus, including children in Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan and its southern city of Shiraz. The media has also reported cases in the cities of Karaj and Yazd.
"The first few days we all thought patients had drunken alcohol to protect themselves of corona, as some of them claimed so, but later we realized from their families and friends that they were mostly alcohol users who would get their alcohol from bootleggers, but this time what they had been handed over was a methanol-based drink, not their usual booze, named Araq, mixed with water and ethanol," Gholam Hosein Mohebbi, head of the public relation of Imam Hospital of Ahwaz, told ABC News.
Muslim drinkers in Iran are punished cash fines and up to 80 lashes, however, a minority of other religions are permitted to consume alcohol in private. It has been reported that there were methanol poisoning cases in Iran which date back to 2018. An academic study showed that 768 people had fallen sick between September-October, 2018 alone, killing 76 people. This goes to show that illegal consumption of alcohol through bootlegging has affected Iran in the past but the cases have risen in number after the COVID-19 pandemic.
These fake remedies spread across social media overwhelmed the people after the government of Iran downplayed the pandemic for days before the affected numbers went up abruptly.
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