Hossein Sheikholeslam spent years studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before he returned to Iran, in 1979, to join the revolution and to participate in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. “I was there all four hundred and forty-four days,” he recalled, the last time I saw him, in Tehran, in 2015. “I helped put together and translate the classified cables that the Americans had shredded.” He went on to become a member of parliament, the Ambassador to Syria, and the deputy foreign minister. He was one of the leading figures in Iran’s attempt to export its revolutionary ideology. He had been in Syria and Lebanon days before a suicide bomber drove into the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Beirut, in 1983. In 2015, we had a painfully long argument about why the regime still rallied its followers to shout “Death to America” at public events more than three decades later. Sheikholeslam, who by then had a silvery beard and six children, had been nicknamed Gap Tooth by the hostages, for obvious reasons. I asked him if he knew that. He grinned wide enough to show me that the gap was gone. “It’s artificial,” he said, tapping his front teeth. Sheikholeslam died, on Thursday, of COVID-19, which is caused by the new coronavirus. He was the latest in a growing list of Iranian officials to be felled by the disease. Eight per cent of Iran’s parliament has been infected; two members have died.

In just the past two weeks, the number of COVID-19 cases in Iran has soared to more than forty-seven hundred—up more than a thousand in just a day. In Qom, the holy city that is the epicenter of the outbreak, the cemetery has been unable to keep up with the number of deaths. On Wednesday, the BBC Persian Service posted a cell-phone video showing row after row of black body bags awaiting burial in Qom. Other videos show men wearing hazmat suits lowering shrouded bodies into the ground.

Iran is one of the epicenters of the global disease that, as of Friday morning, had infected more than a hundred thousand and killed more than thirty-four hundred globally. Iran’s official death toll is a hundred and twenty-four, although unofficial accounts claim that it may be significantly higher. On all six inhabited continents, COVID-19 is transforming human life. Some three million children are not attending school in eleven countries in Europe and Asia, with millions more ordered to stay at home in partial closures in the United States and Europe, according to UNESCO. “We are working with countries to assure the continuity of learning for all,” UNESCO’s director-general, Audrey Azoulay, said in a statement. “The global scale and speed of the current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education.”

On Thursday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, issued a global warning. “This is not a drill,” he said. “This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.” In a worst-case scenario, governments face being crippled by the outbreak. Britain is drawing up plans to suspend Parliament for up to five months—until September—to contain the spread of the virus, the Times of London reported.

Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, predicted that the economic setbacks from the epidemic will more than wipe out expected growth in the global economy in 2020. COVID-19 has so far hit eighty-nine of the I.M.F.’s hundred and eighty-nine member states. The World Health Organization has advised against using cash, because bills can be a means of transmission. The virus can cling to any currency; it doesn’t distinguish between dollars, dinars, yen, yuan, rials, rubles, or escudos. China and South Korea have started sterilizing their currency and then quarantining it for fourteen days to stem contagion.

By Friday morning, the virus had spread to at least twenty-one American states. Schools were closed in Washington State, which had the most significant outbreak. Major conferences—the American Bar Association conference on white-collar crime, in San Diego; the American Physical Society meeting of physicists, in Denver; Facebook’s F8 developer conference, in Houston—were cancelled. President Trump was scheduled to speak next week at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society meeting, in Orlando. It usually draws tens of thousands of attendees but it, too, has been cancelled—for the first time in fifty-eight years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, has banned all nonessential travel by staff, according to USA Today.

The global response has been complicated by the lack of definitive knowledge about the basics of the new coronavirus—from the pattern and pace of transmission to the mortality rate. Most data is currently based on preliminary and often cursory information. A study released on Tuesday identified two types—an aggressive and predominant L strain and an ancestral S strain. The new coronavirus is widely believed to have been transmitted first by an animal to a human in the Chinese city of Wuhan, but, this week, a dog in Hong Kong is reported to have tested “weak positive” for the coronavirus, most likely transmitted by a human. The government warned owners not to kiss their pets.

In Iran, the eighty-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made a rare appearance in public this week—wearing latex gloves—to plant a tree in honor of National Arbor Day. One of his advisers—and the adviser’s mother—died of the virus this week. The revolutionaries have described their theocracy as “the government of God.” But Khamenei told Iranians this week that they’re now on their own when it comes to the disease. “God has obliged us to feel responsible for our own health and that of others,” he said, in remarks on national television, on Tuesday. “Anything that helps prevent the spread of coronavirus is a good deed, and anything that helps spread it is a sin.”

The same day, Khamenei ordered the mobilization of more than three hundred thousand security forces, including Revolutionary Guards, Basij paramilitary forces, and firefighters, to help test Iranians for the disease, sanitize public venues, set up checkpoints, and trace the trail of patient infections. In Qom, the Revolutionary Guards used armored vehicles, adorned with banners declaring “Operation Crackdown on Coronavirus,” to spray major streets with disinfectants. In Tehran, the parliament was suspended indefinitely. “These people have a close relationship with the people and they carry different viruses from different parts of the country, which may create a new virus, so we recommend the lawmakers to cut off their relationship with the public for now,” Abdolreza Mesri, the deputy speaker of parliament, said. In Golestan, another hard-hit province, the government used drones to sprinkle hospitals, mosques, and public buildings. On Thursday, the government announced that checkpoints would be set up across the country to limit travel and prevent wider contagion. “Many cars on the roads are taking the virus with them,” the Health Minister, Saeed Namaki, said in a press conference. The C.D.C. says that it is possible to spread the disease on surfaces but that the primary transmission is through person-to-person contact.

In a reflection of how widely the virus has spread, Iran this week also announced that it would temporarily release more than fifty-four thousand prisoners—almost a quarter of its prison population—because of an outbreak of COVID-19 in three jails, including the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran. Prisoners deemed dangerous to the public or who had long sentences for major crimes were not eligible; anyone who was released also had to post a large bail. Some key political prisoners, including Americans and dual nationals, were not furloughed, according to media accounts.