COVID-19: Kurdistan Region’s total cases top 102,000
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Kurdistan Region health authorities recorded over 160 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total infections to date at over 102,000 since the first case there was confirmed in early March.
In its daily statement on COVID-19 figures, the regional health ministry said it had completed 4,998 tests across the autonomous region in the previous day, 164 of which returned positive.
The official statement also noted that there had been three deaths during the same period: two in Sulaimani province, and one in Duhok.
There have now been over 102,581 confirmed infections in the Kurdistan Region, 3,362 of them fatal, according to ministry data.
So far, the ministry has classified 68,454 patients as having recovered from the highly-infectious disease. It is important to note that a patient classified as a “recovery” means they are no longer actively treated by health professionals, not that they have fully recovered.
The Kurdistan Region’s interior ministry on Thursday announced a new set of regulations as a new variant of the virus looms in a number of countries around the world.
The Region has imposed travel ban on, “the United Kingdom, South Africa, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Iran, and Japan,” over the concerns of the new strain, according to a statement from interior ministry.
The ministry also prohibited holding New Year’s celebrations in a bid to prevent mass gatherings that likely contribute to large infections.
Read More: Kurdistan Region bans travel to nine countries over new COVID-19 strain
According to Johns Hopkins University’s database, the coronavirus has infected more than 79 million people worldwide and killed over 1.7 million. The actual figures could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.
Editing by John J. Catherine