COVID-19: Iraq announcess over 4,100 new cases, 67 deaths

Iraqi health officials announced 4,172 new coronavirus infections and 76 fatalities over the previous 24 hours.

Mustafa Shilani 2020/10/06 19:26

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Iraqi health officials announced 4,172 new coronavirus infections and 67 fatalities over the previous 24 hours.

The Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment said in its daily pandemic statement that it had completed over 24,000 tests for the virus in the past day, making for a total of 2,395,387 carried out since the first known national case in February.

This comes as tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims head to the southern city of Karbala to mark the end of the 40-day-long annual observance known as Arbaeen, despite repeated warnings from health professionals that such mass gatherings can drastically increase the chance of mass coronavirus outbreaks.

According to official ministry figures, the total number of infections so far in Iraq has reached 387,121, including nearly 10,000 deaths.

Officials have said that 316,371 patients have recovered, but is important to note that this only means that they are no longer being actively treated by health professionals, not that they have fully recovered. Increasingly, medical experts recognize that some COVID-19 symptoms often continue long after an individual’s formal recovery and that various other complications, including significant lung damage, could be permanent.

Today's infection and fatality figures reported by the Iraqi federal government in Baghdad do not include the most recent developments in the autonomous Kurdistan Region, which has its own health ministry and typically announces results later in the day. As such, Kurdistan's figures are usually added to the following day's national tally.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that a vaccine against COVID-19 may be ready by the end of the year.

"We will need vaccines, and there is hope that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year," Ghebreyesus said after a two-day meeting of the organization's executive council on the pandemic.

There are nine experimental vaccines under the WHO-led COVAX initiative, which aims to distribute two billion doses of protective COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021.

The coronavirus has infected more than 35 million people worldwide and killed over one million, according to Johns Hopkins University’s database. The actual figures could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.

Editing by John J. Catherine