First Cases of SARS-CoV-2 in Iran, 2020: Case Series Report

Abstract

In Jan 2020, the outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Wuhan, Hubei Province of China spread increasingly to other countries worldwide which WHO declared it as a public health emergency of international concern. Iran was included in the affected countries. Throat swab specimens were collected and tested by using real-time reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) kit targeting the E region for screening and RNA dependent RNA polymerase for confirmation. Conventional RT-PCR was conducted for the N region and the PCR products were sequenced by Sanger sequencing. The first seven cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections were identified in Qom, Iran. This report describes the clinical and epidemiological features of the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 confirmed in Iran. Future research should focus on finding the routes of transmission for this virus, including the possibility of transmission from foreign tourists to identify the possible origin of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Iran.

Study on SARS-CoV-2 strains in Iran reveals potential contribution of co-infection with and recombination between different strains to the emergence of new strains

“…It is expected that the dearth of whole genome sequence data from some countries/territories was related to cost and technical limitations. This is the case for Iran, a country in which infected individuals were reported in early February 2020, soon after the start of the pandemic ( Yavarian et al, 2020 ). By November 21, 2020 when the present study was initiated, there were only 18 complete high coverage SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from Iran available at GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data; https://plarform.gisaid.org ) (supplementary Table S1).…”

Increased production of illegal alcoholic beverages during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hamadan, Iran

“…By Feb 2021, over 100 million people had been diagnosed with the disease, and more than two million had died. In Iran, the first case of COVID-19 was identified on Feb 19, 2020, in the city of Qom [ 2 ]. Due to the lack of a clear plan to quarantine infected areas, the disease spread rapidly in Iran, by Mar 2021, the number of COVID-19 patients and deaths reached more than 15,00,000 and 60,000, respectively [ 3 ].…”

Dissection of non-pharmaceutical interventions implemented by Iran, South Korea, and Turkey in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic

“…Following the transmission of COVID-19 in China, the first confirmed cases of the disease in Iran came on February 19, 2020 [ 23 ]. In response, the government launched national and provincial committees to designate different strategies against COVID-19 [ 11 ].…”