Kurdistan Region COVID-19 fatalities surpass 1,500

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region on Sunday registered 24 fatalities due to the coronavirus in the past 24 hours, raising the total death count to 1,500 since the pandemic hit the region in early March.

In its daily statement on COVID-19 figures, the regional health ministry said it had completed 4,446 tests across the autonomous region in the past day, 444 of which were positive.

The official statement also noted that there had been 24 deaths during the same period: 11 in Duhok province, six in Sulaimani province, four in Erbil, and three in Halabja.

There have now been 41,002 confirmed infections in the Kurdistan Region, 1,519 of them fatal.

As Fall approaches in the Kurdistan Region, health officials repeatedly warn residents to strictly adhere to precautionary measures as infections from both coronavirus and seasonal influenzas could co-occur, overburdening the health care system. 

Health officials say that 26,464 coronavirus patients have recovered, but it is important to note that a patient classified as a “recovery” means they are no longer being actively treated by health professionals, not that they have fully recovered. Increasingly, medical experts recognize that COVID-19 symptoms, some of them serious, often continue long after an individual’s formal recovery and that various other symptoms could be permanent.

The coronavirus has infected more than 31 million people worldwide and killed over 946,000 according to Johns Hopkins University’s database. The actual figures could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.

Editing by Khrush Najari