Politics

COVID-19: Iraq reports over 2,800 new cases, 77 fatalities

Iraq's Ministry of Health and Environment announced on Wednesday that it had recorded over 2,800 new coronavirus cases for the second day in a row, as well as more than 75 fatalities in the past 24 hours.

Halgurd Sherwani 2020/08/05 13:27

middle east Iraq COVID-19 Pandemic Coronavirus Baghdad Egypt

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Iraq's Ministry of Health and Environment announced on Wednesday that it had recorded over 2,800 new coronavirus cases for the second day in a row, as well as more than 75 fatalities in the past 24 hours.

Per a ministry statement, health workers had conducted 16,531 coronavirus tests during the same period, raising the total number of such tests to 1,076,150 given since the start of the pandemic.

The total number of cases rose by 2,834 to reach 137,556, according to the ministry. The ministry also reported 77 new deaths, bringing the total fatalities to 5,094.

On Tuesday, Iraq became the Arab-majority nation with the overall highest deaths rates from the disease as it surpassed 5,000.

Egypt is the second highest Arab country in terms of fatalities that have recorded 4, 912 deaths so far, according to government-reported data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, which shows that the coronavirus has infected more than 18.6 million people worldwide and killed over 700,000. The actual figures could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.

Taking the size of the population of each country into account, those figures become stark. The population of Iraq is nearly 40 million, while the population of Egypt is nearly 100 million—over twice as much.

Thus, while Iraq has slightly more coronavirus deaths than Egypt, which has the second-largest number of such deaths among Arab countries, Iraq has over twice as many per capita.

The start of the rise in Iraqi cases follows on the reopening in mid-May of Iraq’s borders with Iran, the original epicenter of the disease in the Middle East.

As coronavirus cases continue to rise on a daily basis, Iraqi authorities have intensified their efforts to spread awareness of the disease and the measures required to counter it through various public channels, including broadcast and social media.

Editing by John J. Catherine