TEHRAN – The 21st Abu Rayhan Biruni Research Festival will be held virtually on December 22, with a theme of “Coronavirus defeat in the shadow of research”.

In this festival, the top international and national researchers and prominent researchers in the fields of students, centers, colleges, journals, and articles are introduced and honored.

Abu Rayhan Biruni Research Festival of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences is held every year in honor of Iranian scholar and polymath Abu Rayhan Biruni (973–1050), aiming to commemorate the researchers and spread the spirit of research and innovation, motivate and improve the quantity and quality of research and create a suitable platform for research interaction.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, all events even the most important global gathering was inevitably held virtually.

Earlier in May, deputy health minister Reza Malekzadeh stated that Iran ranked third in terms of scientific findings on coronavirus in the world.

He went on to explain that most of the coronavirus research currently being conducted in the country is interventional schemes, and 35 schemes are finding effective treatments for COVID-19.

Moreover, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced clinical trials of only 12 countries, including Iran, with scientific and high-level research capabilities that can be cited worldwide.

In the press briefing on Sunday, Health Ministry spokesperson Sima-Sadat Lari confirmed 3,362 new cases of COVID-19 infection, raising the total number of infections to 446,448. She added that 374,170 patients have so far recovered, but 4,059 still remain in critical conditions of the disease.

In the past 24 hours, 195 patients have lost their lives, bringing the total number of deaths to 25,589, she added.

Lari noted that so far 3,932,571 COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

She said the high-risk “red” zones include provinces of Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, East Azarbaijan, South Khorasan, Semnan, Qazvin, Lorestan, Ardebil, Khuzestan, Kermanshah, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Gilan, Bushehr, Zanjan, Ilam, Khorasan Razavi, Mazandaran, Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, Alborz, West Azarbaijan, Markazi, Kerman, North Khorasan, Hamedan, and Yazd.

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