President Urges Plans to Resume Necessary Travels to, from Iran

In a Saturday meeting with the chairpersons of committees of the Coronavirus Fight National Headquarters, Rouhani stressed the need for the formulation of detailed protocols to make it possible for Iranian or foreign nationals to make the necessary trips to Iran or leave the country amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

The president assigned the Health Ministry to coordinate efforts with the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development to define the necessary health protocols relating to the travels and bring them into force after being ratified by the Coronavirus Fight National Headquarters.

The new health protocols should allow for the necessary travels, which are mainly business travels for trade with other countries, and also for the repatriation of the Iranian citizens, Rouhani said.

The president also called on the Health Ministry and the Vice Presidency for Science and Technology to cooperate with domestic knowledge-based companies and support their plans for the production of the software and tests kits for COVID-19 diagnosis.

He further assigned the Ministry of Health to use the internationally recognized criteria to categorize the country’s provinces and cities according to the status of the coronavirus outbreak, define three separate zones, and begin to enforce the necessary protocols for each category on the basis of the defined criteria.

The daily death toll from the novel coronavirus in Iran dropped for the fifth day in a row on Saturday, as nearly 56,000 positive cases have fully recovered from the disease across the country.