Increased production of illegal alcoholic beverages during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hamadan, Iran

Excerpt

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first reported in Dec 2019 in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread to other countries, with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring the disease a pandemic on Mar 11, 2020 [1]. By Feb 2021, over 100 million people had been diagnosed with the disease, and more than two million had died. In Iran, the first case of COVID-19 was identified on Feb 19, 2020, in the city of Qom [2]. Due to the lack of a clear plan to quarantine infected areas, the disease spread rapidly in Iran, by Mar 2021, the number of COVID-19 patients and deaths reached more than 15,00,000 and 60,000, respectively [3]. A faulty understanding of effective treatments, on the one hand, and misconceptions about and the use of nonstandard and superstitious methods on the other, caused the consequences of this pandemic disease to vary and be somewhat unpredictable [4]. A recommendation to consume alcohol to fight COVID-19 was one of the irresponsible and superstitious suggestions made by some unprofessional people, which had deadly consequences around the world [5]. According to the Iranian Ministry of Health, more than 3000 people have been hospitalized for alcohol intoxication during the pandemic, 600 people have died [6]. Due to the lack of consumer awareness of beverages’ ethanol contents, the prevalence of ethanol poisoning in Iran is predicted to be higher than in developed countries. …