Iraqi women wear protective face masks, following an outbreak of coronavirus, as they look at books at Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, Iraq March 6, 2020. Photo: Reuters
BAGHDAD,— The Iraqi Health Ministry on Friday said that the daily increase of COVID-19 cases in the country jumped to 416, the highest so far, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 5,873.
The new cases included 265 in the capital Baghdad, 31 in Dhi Qar, 28 in Karbala, 22 in Sulaimani, 16 in Babil, 15 in Basra, 13 in Diyala, seven in Wasit, five in Najaf, four in Maysan, three each in Kirkuk and Muthanna, two in Salahudin and one each in Diwaniyah and Nineveh, the ministry said in a statement.
The statement also reported six more deaths during the day, five of them in Baghdad’s hospitals and one in Basra, bringing the death toll in the country to 185, while 3,044 have recovered so far.
The new cases were recorded after 5,246 test kits were used across the country during the past 24 hours, and a total of 216,731 tests have been carried out since the outbreak of the disease, according to the statement.
25 new cases of coronavirus recorded in Iraq’s Kurdistan region in the past 24-hour, the ministry of health of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said in a statement on Friday.
China has been helping Iraq fight the COVID-19 pandemic, through enhancing Iraq’s capability of containing the spread of the contagious disease.
From March 7 to April 26, a Chinese team of seven medical experts spent 50 days in Iraq to help contain the disease, during which they helped build a PCR lab and an advanced CT scanner in Baghdad.
Since March 7, China has also sent three batches of medical aid to Iraq.
In March 2020 the World Health Organization has declared the spread of coronavirus, formally known COVID-19, to be a pandemic. The statistics on Friday evening showed that there are over 5,871,347 coronavirus cases globally, including more than 362,238 confirmed deaths, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
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