9K+ Infected Syrians Each Insist They The Country’s 1 Documented Coronoavirus Case

“Oh, good, finally some acknowledgement for my case,” mused Maryam Farouk, 38. “Can I leave my bedroom yet?”

Damascus, March 24 – Almost ten thousand COVID19-positive citizens in the Syrian Arab Republic claim to be the single patient that the Assad regime has acknowledged in the country, local sources reported Tuesday.

Figures issued by the Syrian Ministry of Health on Monday morning listed a single diagnosed instance of The Wuhan coronavirus, prompting people all over Syria who already suffer the disease or simply carry it without symptoms to insist the statistic refers to them, as they caught it from an unknown number of coronavirus-positive Iranians moving without pause to and from their home country despite horrific figures on the pandemic’s spread in Iran itself.

“Hey. that’s me!” crowed Hassan Abu Obeid, 50, of Tripoli. “Wafa, look, I’m famous!” The energy he expended in addressing his wife exhausted him, necessitating bed rest for the rest of the day.

“Oh, good, finally some acknowledgement for my case,” mused Maryam Farouk, 38. “Can I leave my bedroom yet?”

Members of Shiite militias and other Iranian proxies have exerted effective control of Syria since the early phases of the Syrian Civil war, now in its ninth year. Movement of Iranian troops, advisers, settlers, and other personnel back and forth have spread coronavirus throughout Syria even as Iran struggles to contain the pandemic within it own borders. Weeks of official silence on the prevalence of the deadly respiratory illness stemmed from the Assad regime’s efforts to minimize panic and embarrassment over the spread of the pathogen; that silence gave way yesterday to a grim concession to reality, albeit of a limited scope.

Several other countries have also refused to acknowledge, or even ascertain, the true number of coronavirus cases within their borders, for similar reasons. China, where the outbreak began late last year, applied pressure to international organizations to downplay the contagious and dangerous nature of the disease, and now boasts of no new cases, while external experts view that claim with suspicion and attribute the absence of new cases to an absence of testing – or to more of the same cover-up methods Beijing employed at the outset of the crisis.

Sources within the presidential palace disclosed that Syria intends to embark on the same type of propaganda campaign that China has waged, obfuscating their own negligence, culpability, incompetence, and malfeasance by sowing and spreading conspiracy theories to the effect that malign outsiders lie behind the pandemic – a time-honored approach in the Middle East where every malady, misfortune, conflict, or unpleasant event can be blamed on Israel, the US, the Jews in general, or some combination thereof.

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