[News] Iran decrees fines without confinement in its third wave

[G h o s t l y.]

Not wearing the mask on the street will be fined 500,000 riyals (1.3 euros). Businesses that serve people without a mask or taxi drivers traveling with uncovered passengers may be penalized



 

"Excuse me, you came in without a mask. That is not how I can serve you," says a cafeteria clerk to a young customer who has just entered the premises without covering her mouth. "What difference does it make?", She replies, "if I come to eat." "Okay, but while you're not doing it you should have your mask on," concludes the waitress, who this time turns a blind eye and violates one of the regulations recently applied in the Iranian capital to prevent the trail of deaths from Covid- 19 is prolonged.
 

Iran, the Middle Eastern country hardest hit by the pandemic, is riding wave after wave and getting worse, experts say. She's already on the third. This Sunday, the Health spokesperson, Sima Sadat Lari, announced another record number: 251 deaths from the disease, adding to a total of 28,544 since the crisis broke out at the end of last February. Just four days ago another record had been registered, of 239 deaths, marking a trend that, in terms of new infections, is exceeding 3,500 daily.
 

Although the contagion maps offered by the authorities show a country completely painted in red, the situation is particularly worrying in Tehran, where not even senior officials are being saved. This Sunday it has been confirmed that Ali Akbar Salehi, vice president for nuclear affairs and one of the presidential candidates next year, is confined after testing positive. So is Mohamad Baguir Nobajt, vice president and head of the Budget Planning Organization.

Thus ends another difficult week for the Executive, which began with President Hasan Rohani canceling a meeting with Parliament's spokesman, Mohamed Baguir Galibaf, after he visited a hospital with coronavirus infections, and which ended with the United States sanctioning en bloc to all Iranian banks, further complicating the po[CENSORED]tion's access to food, medicine and a possible vaccine to end the pandemic.
 

In between, the Government has approved a more aggressive response to stop the infections. For the first time, fines have been decreed for failing to comply with health protocols. Not wearing the mask on the street, in any place and circumstance, will be fined with 500,000 rials (1.3 euros). Businesses that serve people without a mask, or taxi drivers who travel with uncovered passengers may be penalized and even closed, if the behavior persists.
 

The highest fines will be imposed on those who, after being declared infected, abandon the two weeks of mandatory confinement. They will have to pay two million rials, a little more than six euros, little in the West but a lot in a country whose currency continues to lose value while the living conditions of the majority, plagued by sanctions and mismanagement, gradually worsen. "If they leave home, harsh penalties will be imposed on them," said presidential spokesman Ali Rabiei this week.
 

Despite the EU's rejection of the latest sanctions -which, a priori, will not block the use of the INSTEX tool, to exchange goods not sanctionable by Washington with Iran-, alleging humanitarian reasons, Donald Trump has once again been advised , by think tanks in favor of a hard line against Iran. Also despite the fact that, according to most experts, years of sanctions have only managed to harden the position of Iranian power, in addition to impoverishing millions of Iranians.
 

If after signing the comatose nuclear pact in 2015, the dollar was trading at 32,000 Iranian rials, this Sunday it is trading at 315,000. Along the way, the US has greatly hampered the sale of crude, which has made it difficult to access currency. His latest decision has been to sanction the 18 banks that remained to be sanctioned, preventing any non-Iranian entity from doing business of any kind. Thus, although the US claims that it does not sanction importing medicines, it does sanction paying for them.