After COVID-19 started spreading in China, Iran emerged as one of the first countries the virus widely circulated, quickly surpassing infection rates of other countries at that time. Operating in a vastly different context than China or Italy, health officials had to think and work quickly to design early detection methods, communication strategies, and lockdown policies.

“There were not many examples from other countries [at that time],” said Dr. Christoph Hamelmann, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative to Iran. “China, for example, is so culturally different that we couldn’t respond in the same way. Many things had to be developed right here in the country.”

With the situation rapidly evolving on the ground in Iran, including the first COVID-positive employee on the team, the WHO country office had to brainstorm and devise its own standard operating procedures — often weeks ahead of global guidance. In early March 2020, WHO experts traveled to Iran and met with national stakeholders and health officials to plan and scale up the response to the escalating epidemic, prioritize areas for implementing control measures, and pinpoint measures to strengthen the response in areas that had not yet been affected. There was no time to waste, particularly given the risk of further cross-border spread between countries in the region and beyond.

The most immediate priorities were instituting early detection, providing isolation and treatment, implementing effective contact tracing, and ensuring a strong system of risk communications in a context rife with misinformation. Since the very beginning of the pandemic, WHO continues to strengthen the COVID-19 testing capacity of the national laboratory network and provides the labs with thousands of PCR diagnostic tests. WHO also navigated logistical hurdles and global scarcity in personal protective equipment (PPE) and delivered thousands of masks and face shields, gloves, shoe covers, and other supplies to the virus-battered country. Additionally, it delivered shipments of medicines for Iran’s participation in the Solidarity Trial, one of the world’s largest studies to identify effective COVID-19 treatments.

Read the full article about Iran's COVID-19 response by Sarah Alaoui at United Nations Foundation.