Iraqi Kurdistan records 6th coronavirus death, 13 new cases
A health workers at the coronavirus center at a hospital in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, May 2020. Photo: Rudaw
HEWLÊR-Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— The health authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Sulaimani province announced the death of a coronavirus patient, raising the total death toll due to the new disease in the autonomous Kurdish region to six.
Sulaimani’s Health Director Sabah Hawrami said on Saturday that a patient has died in the governorate from COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus infection, bringing the Kurdistan Region’s death toll from the outbreak to six.
In a post on his Facebook account, Hawrami said that the medical team had done its best to treat the 37-year-old man and extended his condolences to the patient’s family.
On May 15, the patient presented with symptom of the disease and tested positive for the virus on May 19. He was under observation until his condition got worse on Friday and was put on a ventilator, before dying on Saturday.
He had no known underlying health conditions.
He became the fifth person from Sulaimani province to have died after contracting the virus, the only other Kurdistan Region death having been recorded in Erbil on April 28.
According to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Health, eight other members of his family have tested positive for coronavirus as well, including his brother, who works at Asa Hospital.
13 new cases of coronavirus recorded in Iraqi Kurdistan in the past 24-hour, the ministry of health of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said in a statement on Saturday.
According to the ministry 4 people in Duhok province, 3 people in Erbil and 6 in Sulaimani were tested positive for covid-19.
So far, and according to the KRG ministry of health there have been 582 cases of coronavirus in Iraqi Kurdistan. A total of 409 patients have recovered, and six people have died.
The Kurdistan Region began implementing measures to curb the spread of the virus in late February, resorting to partial and complete lockdowns in March.
Lockdown measures were gradually lifted as rates of infection slowed, allowing shops, mosques and churches to reopen their doors and non-essential traffic to run through the Region’s roads – though authorities have called on the public to adhere to their end of pandemic-induced regulations.
But with cases of the virus growing since the beginning of May, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) imposed a full, 72-hour lockdown across the Kurdistan Region on the three days of Eid al-Fitr last week. The KRG renewed a ban on travel between provinces in the Kurdistan Region until June 16, according to the latest government-issued order on Wednesday.
In March 2020 the World Health Organization has declared the spread of coronavirus, formally known COVID-19, to be a pandemic. The statistics on Saturday evening showed that there are over 5,988,416 coronavirus cases globally, including more than 366,654 confirmed deaths, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
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