Syndicate: 85 journalists in Kurdistan Region have contracted COVID-19

Over 80 journalists across the Kurdistan Region have so far contracted the coronavirus, Kurdistan Journalists Syndicate Azad Hamad Amin said on Sunday.

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Over 80 journalists across the Kurdistan Region have so far contracted the coronavirus, Kurdistan Journalists Syndicate Azad Hamad Amin said on Sunday.

The autonomous region of Iraq, roundly praised by both regional and international health authorities for managing the pandemic in recent months, is now experiencing a dramatic spike in infections of the highly contagious disease, formally known as COVID-19.

Read More: KRG announces 204 new COVID-19 cases; Erbil imposes partial curfew

Journalists, alongside essential public employees such as doctors and security forces, have largely continued working despite curfews and various travel restrictions that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has enacted since the first case was confirmed in the region.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, the KRG Interior Ministry has allowed journalists and ground reporters to cover the pandemic in the region during lockdowns.

“So far, 85 journalists have been infected with coronavirus,” Amin told a morning television program Kurdistan 24 morning show.

He went on to explain that one of them has died, all but six of those infected are males, and that “the majority of the infectees are from Sulaimani province.” 

The epicenter of the virus in the Kurdistan Region, Sulaimani has so far confirmed over five thousand COVID-19 cases, 207 of them fatal.

Most of the infected journalists had been working within the offices of various media organization, rather than in the field as ground reporters, added Amin, saying he held those media administrators “responsible” for those infections.

The KRG Ministry of Health issued a statement in early April, however, asking that all field journalists operating in the Kurdistan Region be tested for COVID-19 to mitigate the risks of the virus spreading both to each other and through them to members of the general population.

Amin claimed that some local media organizations are “hiding” information about their employees who may have caught the virus.

According to official KRG figures, more than seven thousand people in the Kurdistan Region have so far contracted the coronavirus and 240 have died from complications associated with the disease.

Editing by John J. Catherine