Iran is a big problem with regards to the containment of COVID-19. Qom is a theological seat of learning for Shia Islam and therefore a place of pilgrimage. The authorities in Iran have been censoring news about the situation in Iran, but Shia scholars are coming and going and therefore exponential spread of the virus both within Iran and in neighbouring states with large Shia communities is inevitable:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-iran-accused-of-covering-up-50-deaths-in-qom-kq57fsg63
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Qom is Iran’s premier centre of theological learning, visited regularly by Shia clerics from around the Muslim world. The authorities believe the virus arrived in the city either from a businessman who had visited China or from Chinese workers building a solar electricity plant near by.
From Qom, it has spread to four other cities, including Tehran, where a senior district official is among those infected.
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Iran has become a new centre for the spread of the disease, just as cases in China, where the virus first took hold, start to tail off.
By this morning, cases had been confirmed in travellers from Iran to Lebanon, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Canada. This afternoon, Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which border Iran, were added to the list.
In the former case an Afghan citizen who had recently returned from Qom was diagnosed, in the latter the patient is an Iranian theological student visiting the holy Iraqi city of Najaf.
Other neighbours, including Turkey, have now closed their Iranian borders.
The cases in Kuwait also show some anomalies: the three patients being treated there had not been to Qom, but had flown from the northern Iranian city of Mashhad, where no cases have been reported."