In Iran, health officials say over 4,000 people have died of COVID-19 and more than 60,000 people have been infected.
Many Iranian-Americans in Indiana are not only struggling to take care of their families here. They're also keeping track of what’s going on abroad.
“This is probably the first major, global shared experience of crisis,” says Hussein Banai, an assistant professor at Indiana University’s international studies department. “And for me, it started obviously with Iran, having family members affected by it.”
Banai said families like his are not only having to shelter in place here. He’s also keeping track of his family in Tehran. His grandmother died as a result of the virus. And while helping her, other family members got infected.
“In the process of moving out of the hospital, other family members became exposed and tested positive in subsequent weeks," Banai says. “So I've had aunts and uncles test positive, friends, family, friends who were helping, or were going in and out of hospitals. And then in turn, they have infected and exposed their family members.”
But Banai is not just observing the crisis as an expat or family member. He’s also a political scientist specializing in U.S.-Iran relations.
He says Iran’s government reacted late — like many other countries did. And he thinks its response is primarily to blame for the swift spread of the virus. He says many Iranians have criticised the government's delays in closing public places.
On top of that, though, he says U.S. foreign policy is playing a role, too. Iran is a unique case because it is under sanctions from the Trump administration over its nuclear program. He believes they’re making the crisis worse in some ways.
“At just a basic level, Iran has been locked out of global financial networks and economic ties with countries that it could seek direct help from,” Bania says. “So at that basic level, the government is way more limited in terms of its contacts than it otherwise would be.”
Democratic lawmakers are also asking the State Department to consider easing sanctions for now.
Banai says the sanctions aren’t directly targeting medical supplies. And the country is probably able to get basics from countries with which it has better relations.
“There’s no definitive studies that have shown that the sanctions have severely hampered the supply of medical goods, because the government has access to them through China. It can bypass the sanctions within other places,” he says.
He says the real impact of the sanctions is that it makes it harder for the government to react in a more general way because of how they’re harming the economy. At a time when nearly every country’s economy is collapsing, Iran’s is being hit particularly hard.
“It’s a global pandemic,” he says. “So having harsh economic sanctions has a really draconian impact on the Iranian economy. You're just hurting people for no good reason. So, they should be suspended until this thing passes -- at least.”
U.S. officials say they are making offers to provide humanitarian assistance to Iran to fight the virus.
So far, Iran has rejected those offers and blamed the U.S. for the crisis.
