In Tehran, a worker in a hazmat suit ambles across a lot, carrying a stretcher like a briefcase. As the stretcher is thrown to the ground at the lot’s edge, you realize it’s just been used. The tile-like protrusions in the ground aren’t a decorative feature in a courtyard; they’re headstones, laid flat, in a graveyard. It’s silent but for a muezzin, somewhere nearby, calling whoever can hear to prayer.
After becoming an early epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, Iran has struggled to contain the pandemic within its borders, and, for a time, had the highest mortality rate from COVID-19 in the world. The country’s outbreak is believed to have started in Qom, a holy city about two hours from Tehran, in mid-February. In the weeks since, Iran has reported nearly sixty-six thousand confirmed cases of the coronavirus—the seventh-highest count in the world, just behind China—and suffered more than four thousands deaths, with nearly another four thousand people in critical condition. (These are the official numbers, which the W.H.O. and other entities have said could be grossly underestimated.) As Robin Wright reported, the coronavirus outbreak “coincided with two major milestones” in the country—the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution and a parliamentary election—and, for weeks, officials remained mostly quiet about the coronavirus and failed to institute lockdown measures, which many experts say exacerbated the crisis immeasurably. However, President Hassan Rouhani ordered that all schools, religious sites, and shops (with the exception of grocers and pharmacies) be closed for the two-week duration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which began with the spring equinox and during which many in Tehran travel outside the capital. In that time, as shown in the video above, the city of some nine million became a ghost town.
The short film shows scenes from a life in Tehran that had become largely solitary: a city bus carries a single passenger, gloved and masked; a cyclist rides alone on a three-lane highway; a young man plays a guitar on a rooftop, singing a cheerful tune to the barren construction site behind him. There are some congregations: shoppers form a socially distanced line on a curb; four boys sit on a street corner, waiting for something; two elderly men play chess in a park, one’s mask pulled down beneath his mouth to accommodate the cigarette he smokes. Life is evidenced mostly by the city lights at night, which mirror the snow, glowing faintly in the moonlight, that covers the peaks of the Alborz Mountains to the north. In the dim corridor of a bazaar, each storefront shuttered, a man walks briskly, the only sound his clapping footsteps, toward, and eventually into, the light at the end.
On April 1st, Rouhani said, optimistically, that Iran was containing its outbreak successfully. Less than a week later, the country’s parliament convened for the first time in six weeks and voted down a bill calling for a monthlong nationwide lockdown, to further hinder the virus’s spread. Rouhani has announced that low-risk economic activities will be allowed to resume on Saturday. Meanwhile, confirmed cases and deaths in Iran continue to climb. Apart from excluding school and crowded sports and religious events, it’s not known what, in the age of the pandemic, might be considered “low risk.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we've scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
