On any typical day, hundreds of people will visit the Shrine of Fatima Masumeh at Qom, one of Iran’s holiest monuments. Some will stay for hours or days praying at the mosque, gathering in the three large prayer halls or in the courtyards around the burial chamber. Like the millions of pilgrims before them, they will kiss the doors, the windows and the walls of the shrine, many of them desperately sick hoping for a miracle that will cure them.

Now that the holy city of Qom has emerged as the likely epicentre of the coronavirus in Iran, how many of the pilgrims that visited last week, you have to wonder, have been infected, and how many more will die because of the authorities’ refusal to close the city and its much-visited religious shrines, like Masumeh.

Iran has quickly become one of the main virus centres outside of China. Credit:AP

Although Iran only reported its first two cases of COVID-19 on February 19, any chance that might have kept the epidemic from spiralling out of control has already been lost. As of February 29, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported 593 confirmed cases and 43 deaths, but this is the tip of the iceberg.

With the mortality rate of the coronavirus in China currently at around 2 per cent, and with each person with the coronavirus, on average, infecting two to three other people, this suggests hundreds of thousands are already infected. Qom should have been shut weeks ago, yet only on February 28 did the authorities finally agree to restrict visitors to the shrines, and cancelled prayers in Iran’s major cities.