COVID-19: Kurdistan Region announces nearly 600 new cases, 27 fatalities
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region’s Health Ministry on Tuesday recorded just shy of 600 new coronavirus cases over the previous 24 hours, raising the total number of infections since the first known case in the autonomous region earlier this year to over 37,000.
In its daily statement on COVID-19, the regional health ministry stated that health workers had completed 5,443 tests across the autonomous region in the past day, 597 of which were positive.
The official statement also explained that there had been 27 deaths during the same period: 12 in Duhok province, eight in Sulaimani, five in Erbil, and two in Halabja.
There have now been 37,310 confirmed infections in the Kurdistan Region, 1,364 of them fatal.
Health officials say that 23,746 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.
According to a recent study published by the New England Journal of Medicine as reported by the Washington Post, the coronavirus appears to compromise the lining of blood vessels in organs such as the brain, kidneys, heart, and lungs. "More than 20 million patients who have 'recovered' could be living with serious damage to their blood vessels," said the Post. "That could unleash a global surge in vascular diseases, from stroke and atherosclerosis to myocarditis and heart attack."
The Director General of the Erbil Health Department, Dr. Delovan Mohammad, held a press conference on Sunday in which he announced that the provincial government would launch a five-day campaign to educate the public about the highly contagious disease and measures which it needs to take in order to protect individuals and families against the disease.
Read More: Erbil launches COVID-19 awareness campaign as KRG reports over 570 new cases
The campaign involves distributing informational brochures and face masks among residents within Erbil as well as to those traveling between provinces.
The World Health Organization (WHO), alongside local non-governmental organizations, will take part in the campaign, Mohammad said, adding that a total of 35 teams were being mobilized for the educational effort.
In late August, the WHO initiated a "major COVID-19 prevention and containment campaign,” which began in Sulaimani province, the initial epicenter of the coronavirus in the Kurdistan Region, due "mainly to its proximity and long borders with neighboring Iran,” where the first cases in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region spread from.
The Kurdistan Region has recently witnessed new surges in coronavirus cases across its provinces, particularly in Duhok and Erbil, provinces that had both enjoyed relatively fewer infections over past months.
Editing by John J. Catherine