COVID-19: Spike in cases, deaths continues in Kurdistan Region

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Health announced that the current uptick in coronavirus figures continued on Tuesday, with just over 670 new cases recorded over the previous 24 hours.

In its daily statement on the global health crisis in the autonomous federal region of Iraq, the ministry said it had completed 4,744 tests across the four provinces within its jurisdiction in the past day, 671 of which were positive.

The official statement also noted that there had been 32 deaths during the same period: 16 in Sulaimani province, 10 in Duhok, and three in Erbil.

There have now been over 47,000 coronavirus infections in the Kurdistan Region, 1,725 of them fatal, since the first case was confirmed there in early March.

So far, around 30,175 patients are reported as having recovered from the highly-contagious disease. 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 some COVID-19 symptoms, such as chronic fatigue, often continue long after an individual’s formal recovery and that various other complications, including significant lung damage, could be permanent.

The Kurdistan Region and Iraq have been recording an increasingly higher number of cases in recent months amid relaxed lockdown measures and tough economic conditions.

Read More: COVID-19: Iraq’s fatalities exceed 9,000, as infections top 350,000

The coronavirus has infected more than 33.4 million people worldwide and killed over a 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