Iran Insurance Company and Saman Insurance company have extended life insurance policies to cover hospitalization and death due to infection to the new coronavirus.
Iran Insurance Company announced on Tuesday that life insurance policyholders will be eligible for the scheme without any change in the policies they bought earlier.
Saman insurance said the cover includes hospital bills of those who have purchased life insurance policies. Policyholders pay no extra fees to receive the coverage, according to Saman's public relations office.
The company had extended its travel insurance policies to cover coronavirus. The coverage included hospital stay in foreign countries along with losses caused due to policyholders' early return back home.
The measure comes amid rising public concern about spread of the coronavirus. Iran has confirmed 95 infected cases with 15 dead by Tuesday evening.
A majority of the confirmed cases are from the central city of Qom, the epicenter of the disease where a trader who regularly traveled to China is supposed to have spread the deadly infection. The virus has now been detected in nine Iranian provinces.
Tehran has set up a special National Committee to Fight Coronavirus, which aims to tackle the outbreak, and its first session was chaired by President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday.
The president assured the public that the government will control the spread of the disease “in the shortest time possible and with a minimum number of fatalities.”
Gyms, universities, schools, libraries and cultural centers are closed in several cities as part of efforts to stem the spread of the infection.
Several countries, including Armenia, Pakistan and Turkey, have closed borders with Iran to halt the spread of the disease in the Middle East. Kuwait, Bahrain, Afghanistan and Iraq have reported coronavirus cases linked to Iran and imposed travel restrictions to Iran and other countries infected by the killer virus.
Over 80,000 people have been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus and more than 2,700 have died from the infection around the world, most of them in China, where the virus was first reported.
