What is the significance of iran

A significant linear increment in new confirmed cases was observed, which was about 0 to 1, Furthermore, with a three-day delay, a linear increase in COVID case numbers was observed for eight days after the beginning of the Nowruz holidays. The results showed no significant change in the number of new confirmed cases after the implementation of the first intervention CSU.

There is a recurrent pattern of changes in the number of new cases within the period series. This season was 14 days, which shows that a uniform pattern happens every 2 weeks.

It seems that the effect of social distancing rules had been significant, considering the gradual downtrend in the daily number of new cases. As shown in Fig 3 , the daily number of cases exponentially decreased after March 27 for 23 days. In detail, this reduction was observed from March 27 to April 19, , when the government removed the social distancing restriction.

For model diagnostics, the residuals should be white noise. In this connection, there was no pattern in the plot of residuals, and they were randomly scattered around zero. Also, there were no spikes in the autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, indicating that there was no remaining autocorrelation regarding the residuals Fig 4. Furthermore, the Ljung-Box LB test was utilized to understand whether any of the groups of autocorrelations of a time series are different from zero.

Moreover, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test established the normality of residuals. The goodness of fit statistics means absolute percentage error obtained was 1. It should be noted that the prediction can be utilized if the observed spreading pattern, and the number and type of test for detection the COVID cases continues as before and if policies and restrictions are not removed. Therefore, the number of daily new cases would be and for May 3 rd and May 4 th , respectively.

COVID is an infectious disease spread through direct contact between individuals [ 26 ]. Outbreak control measures implemented to diminish the contacts within the population can reduce the height of the peak, the speed at which the virus spreads, and the final scope of the pandemic.

In general, we found a correlation between the national Nowruz holidays, the new social distancing measures and the number of newly confirmed COVID cases in Iran.

However, the closing of kindergartens, schools, and universities was not followed by a reduction in new cases. The first government policy implemented by Iran to combat the outbreak of COVID was the closing of kindergartens, schools, and universities. The result of our study shows that this intervention did not contribute to control the pandemic. A review study, including 16 studies about the effect of school closures during coronavirus outbreaks, indicates that their impact on the spread of COVID is very weak [ 27 ].

Therefore, policymakers need to be aware of the uncertainty of evidence about the efficacy of school closures to slow down COVID, and may need to consider combinations of various distancing measures, instead.

The Nowruz holidays an Iranian national holidays created a significant increase in the number of COVID cases, three days after its start. Due to the lack of personal protective equipment such as masks and disinfectants, as well as a high level of contact between people, the Nowruz holidays was an occasion for easy transmission of the disease in Iran [ 28 ].

Prior to the implementation of social distancing measures, the transmission rates of the COVID infection in Iran were increasing. New social distancing measures were implemented in Iranian Provinces to reduce the risk of expansion of the pandemic.

Our findings indicated that the implementation of the social distancing measures in Iran were effective in controlling the spread of the outbreak, and that the number of new daily COVID cases significantly decreased after adopting these measures. Our results regarding the impact of social distancing policies on the number of COVID cases support earlier findings on the effectiveness of such measures [ 6 , 29 , 30 ].

These studies have shown a decrease in the average daily new COVID cases, once sanitary measures were implemented. There are some potential reasons for the ineffectiveness of government policies to reduce the number of new cases. In Iran, like some other countries such as China [ 31 ], the outbreak coincided with a national holiday.

We found a negative relationship between the Nowruz holidays and the number of cases, which might have dwindled the effectiveness of disease control measures.

The general population was requested to stay at home and self-quarantine during the Nowruz holidays, as well as refrain from visiting their families. Therefore, the degree of the outbreak was expected to be manageable.

This somewhat contradictory result may be because millions of Iranians traveled around the country. With the beginning of the Nowruz holidays, the police reported heavy traffic toward northern cities, therefore traveling might have exacerbated the spread of the outbreak.

It is valuable to mention that the rate of test increment was non-stop, even after social distancing. Therefore, the decrease of COVID patients after the enforcement of social distancing cannot be attributable to a lack of access to testing or to improper distribution.

It is worth noting that, due to the rapidly increasing incidence trend of COVID, it is not only essential to design and implement rules but also to critically plan the moment of implementation of such measures. Late implementation of social distancing measures, such as in Italy, can lead to an exponential increase in the mortality rate in the population [ 32 ].

Previous studies have also indicated that earlier implementation of measures can be more productive. A recent study has shown that every one-day delay in the implementation of social distancing measures leads to a 2. The impact of delays may be particularly significant for communities that are prone to rapid disease transmission. For example, during the Nowruz holidays in Iran, people visited multiple relatives and many others used the two-week break to travel to tourist destinations across the country.

Therefore, earlier implementation of restriction rules and prevention of non-essential travel could have made it easier to control the spread of the outbreak. One way to look at it is that Iran is 68 percent larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 40 percent more population. More important are its topographical barriers. Iran is defined, above all, by its mountains, which form its frontiers, enfold its cities and describe its historical heartland.

To understand Iran, you must understand not only how large it is but also how mountainous it is. They are a southern extension of the Caucasus, running about miles from the northwestern border of Iran, which adjoins Turkey and Armenia, southeast toward Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. It is intensely mountainous on both sides. South of Turkey, the mountains on the western side of the border begin to diminish until they disappear altogether on the Iraqi side.

From this point onward, south of the Kurdish regions, the land on the Iraqi side is increasingly flat, part of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. The Iranian side of the border is mountainous, beginning just a few miles east of the border. Iran has a mountainous border with Turkey, but mountains face a flat plain along the Iraq border. The one region of the western border that does not adhere to this model is in the extreme south, in the swamps where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

There the Zagros swing southeast, and the southern border between Iran and Iraq zigzags south to the Shatt al-Arab, which flows south miles through flat terrain to the Persian Gulf. To the east is the Iranian province of Khuzestan, populated by ethnic Arabs, not Persians. Given the swampy nature of the ground, it can be easily defended and gives Iran a buffer against any force from the west seeking to move along the coastal plain of Iran on the Persian Gulf.

Running east along the Caspian Sea are the Elburz Mountains, which serve as a mountain bridge between the Caucasus-Zagros range and Afghan mountains that eventually culminate in the Hindu Kush.

The Elburz run along the southern coast of the Caspian to the Afghan border, buffering the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. Mountains of lesser elevations then swing down along the Afghan and Pakistani borders, almost to the Arabian Sea. Iran has about miles of coastline, roughly half along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, the rest along the Gulf of Oman. Its most important port, Bandar Abbas, is located on the Strait of Hormuz. There are no equivalent ports along the Gulf of Oman, and the Strait of Hormuz is extremely vulnerable to interdiction.

Therefore, Iran is not a major maritime or naval power. It is and always has been a land power. The center of Iran consists of two desert plateaus that are virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. These are the Dasht-e Kavir, which stretches from Qom in the northwest nearly to the Afghan border, and the Dasht-e Lut, which extends south to Balochistan.

The Dasht-e Kavir consists of a layer of salt covering thick mud, and it is easy to break through the salt layer and drown in the mud. It is one of the most miserable places on earth. Iran is a nation of 70 million mountain dwellers. Even its biggest city, Tehran, is in the foothills of towering mountains. Its population is in a belt stretching through the Zagros and Elbroz mountains on a line running from the eastern shore of the Caspian to the Strait of Hormuz.

There is a secondary concentration of people to the northeast, centered on Mashhad. The rest of the country is lightly inhabited and almost impassable because of the salt-mud flats. If you look carefully at a map of Iran, you can see that the western part of the country — the Zagros Mountains — is actually a land bridge for southern Asia. It is the only path between the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea in the north.

Iran is the route connecting the Indian subcontinent to the Mediterranean Sea. But because of its size and geography, Iran is not a country that can be easily traversed, much less conquered. Oil is to be found in three locations: The southwest is the major region, with lesser deposits along the Iraqi border in the north and one near Qom.

The southwestern oil fields are an extension of the geological formation that created the oil fields in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Hence, the region east of the Shatt al-Arab is of critical importance to Iran.

Therefore, one would expect it to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Iran has the 28th largest economy in the world but ranks only 71st in per capita gross domestic product as expressed in purchasing power.

It ranks with countries like Belarus or Panama. Part of the reason is inefficiencies in the Iranian oil industry, the result of government policies. But there is a deeper geographic problem. Iran has a huge population mostly located in rugged mountains. Mountainous regions are rarely prosperous. The cost of transportation makes the development of industry difficult. Sparsely populated mountain regions are generally poor. Heavily populated mountain regions, when they exist, are much poorer.

Unlike underpopulated and less geographically challenged countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Iran cannot enjoy any shift in the underlying weakness of its economy brought on by higher oil prices and more production. The absence of inhabitable plains means that any industrial plant must develop in regions where the cost of infrastructure tends to undermine the benefits. Oil keeps Iran from sinking even deeper, but it alone cannot catapult Iran out of its condition.

Iran is a fortress. Surrounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the ocean, with a wasteland at its center, Iran is extremely difficult to conquer. This was achieved once by the Mongols, who entered the country from the northeast. The Ottomans penetrated the Zagros Mountains and went northeast as far as the Caspian but made no attempt to move into the Persian heartland.

It has a major influence - verging on a controlling influence in some cases - over the affairs of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The fact that Iran has stealthily built up a network of non-state alliances right across the Middle East, often referred to as "proxy militias", is nothing new.

Starting with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic Republic has been seeking to export its revolutionary ideology and expand its influence beyond its borders ever since the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran in But the page report by the IISS , entitled "Iran's Networks of Influence in the Middle East", provides unprecedented detail on the extent and reach of Iran's operations in the region.

Since the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in , the Quds Force has intensified its operations across the Middle East, providing training, funding and weapons to non-state actors allied to Tehran. It has also developed unconventional forms of asymmetric warfare - such as swarm tactics, drone and cyber-attacks - that have allowed Iran to offset its enemies' superiority in conventional weapons.

Iran reacted to Mr Trump's decision by designating the US military in the Gulf region as a terrorist entity, a largely symbolic gesture. Jack Straw, who was the UK's foreign secretary from to and who has visited Iran several times, believes that Gen Soleimani's role goes well beyond that of a military commander.

Iran resisted. Iran has also successfully controlled damages of US economic terrorism. So yes, it is a powerful nation and has a lot of relations with other nations with a lot of initiatives for regional co-operation. The Lebanese Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah, which is both a political party and an armed militia, "has achieved unique status among Iran's partners", says the report, which documents in detail Iranian supply routes via Syria and Iraq.

Hezbollah has played an important role in conflicts in both of those countries, fighting alongside Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and assisting Iraqi Shia militias. Although the report classifies Hezbollah as "more akin to a trusted junior partner and a brother-in-arms for Iran than a proxy", it nevertheless says the group has become a central interlocutor for an array of Arab militias and political parties with ties to Iran.

The US-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime completely changed the shape of the Middle East and provided Iran with ample opportunity to take advantage. Prior to that event, the Gulf Arab states saw Sunni Arab-ruled Iraq as something of a bulwark against any Iranian expansionism. With that bulwark gone, Iran has successfully capitalised on its religious and cultural ties inside Iraq - which has a Shia Arab majority - to become a dominant force in the country.

As of , Iran had an estimated , active military personnel and , active reserve military personnel. The country spent an estimated 3. In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.

Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions.