New Coronavirus: Two Old Men Die in Iran after Testing Positive

By Staff, Agencies

Health authorities in the central Iranian city of Qom confirmed two deaths as a result of a first incidence of coronavirus in the country.

A source close to the Iranian health minister told Iranian Mehr news agency on Wednesday that two old men had died in hospital in Qom after being tested positive for coronavirus earlier in the day.

Alireza Wahhabzadeh said one of the two had been suffering from chemical weapons injuries suffered during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. He described the other victim as a 65-old man, without elaborating.

The news of the deaths came hours after authorities confirmed first two cases for coronavirus in Iran.

Relatively, an Iranian deputy health minister visited Qom on Wednesday to supervise preparations for confronting a potential spread of the disease.

Qassem Janbabaei said the two men were from two separate neighborhoods of Qom, a city of close to one million people, adding that they had never been out of the province let alone to any foreign country.

“How they contracted coronavirus is not clear and the issue is being probed,” said the official in an interview with the IRNA news agency.

Janbabaei said a hospital in Qom had been dedicated to receive people who were suspected of having contracted the disease. The official added that a second hospital in the city was on high alert to respond to any emergency that might arise.

A spokesman of the Iranian health ministry also said that tests on the two men had been carried out by special teams dispatched from the capital Tehran to Qom after reports emerged of a growing number of influenza cases in the city.