Iran confronts coronavirus amid a ‘battle between science and conspiracy theories’
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/iran-confronts-coronavirus-amid-battle-between-science-and-conspiracy-theories
A member of the Iranian army walks through a temporary 2,000-bed hospital for COVID-19 coronavirus patients set up at the international exhibition center in Tehran.
When Mehdi Variji fell ill with COVID-19 in early March, he holed up in his apartment in Tehran to ride it out. The comforts of home didn’t seem to help. As he grew short of breath and oxygen levels in his blood ebbed, Variji, a 43-year-old physician who ran Tehran’s 21st District Clinic, knew he faced a bleak prognosis. “I’m taking three medicines, but they are not working on me,” he said in cell phone video he shot a few days before his death.