Introduction

When Mehdi Variji fell ill with COVID-19 in early March, he holed up in his apartment in Tehran, Iran, 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 a cellphone video he shot a few days before his death. A somber cellphone video shot on 20 March shows four gowned and masked workers preparing his grave in the courtyard of a shrine in his hometown, Sari. His wife and children stayed away because of the infection risk. It was just after midnight on Nowruz, the first day of the Persian new year and normally the beginning of a joyous festival.

Keywords

COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Treatment