Covid-19 is killing someone every ten minutes in Iran on average, the country's health ministry has said.
Health ministry spokesperson Kianoush Jahanpour announced that around 50 Iranian were contracting the virus every hour.
He said that six people were dying an hour, Iran’s official news agency IRNA reported.
Deputy Health Minister Alireza Reisi said 147 people had died over a 24-hour period, while 1,192 new cases were confirmed.
The total number of infected people in the country now stands at 17,361.
Mr Jahanpour urged people to spend Nowruz, the country's new year's celebrations, indoors.
People working in Iran's medical sector have also suffered significantly at the hands of the virus.
A doctor working in a Tehran hospital died on Thursday to become the tenth to lose their life having caught the coronavirus.
Four nurses have also died of Covid-19 in the Middle Eastern country.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there have now been 222,643 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection across the world.
A total of 9,115 people have died from the related disease Covid-19.
Slightly over 84,000 patients have recovered having been infected.
