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The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread rapidly worldwide and led to the death of thousands of people. To date, there isn’t any vaccine or specific antiviral medicine that can prevent or treat this virus. This caused panic among citizens who try their best to prevent being infected. In Iran, alcohol poisoning was reported and led to the death of hundreds of people in several provinces. The incident occurred after a rumor circulated in the country that drinking alcohol can cure or prevent being infected by COVID-19., Highlights • Currently Iran is not only suffering from the COVID-19 outbreak, but also alcohol poisoning incident was reported weeks ago in several provinces. • This report highlights the details of the incident, its causes and the results. Lessons learned from this incident is shared so that other countries will know what actions should be done to prevent the occurrence of such incident.

The increase in the number and severity of various disasters has put communities in danger. Hospitals and other health care facilities play an important role in managing patients and their companions. The proper functioning of the hospital's units and infrastructure networks are definitively required and disruption to any of them can threaten the patients' lives and disrupt the provision of services. Therefore, seismic hazard analysis of hospitals can help decision makers to estimate the potential losses considering available resources for related proceedings, such as upgrading the seismic resistance of existing buildings and lifelines. This study was conducted in existing hospitals in Yazd. First, the seismic risk analysis of Yazd city was conducted based on two scenarios. Second, fragility curves were prepared for each hospital building and its components including water and fuel tanks, power, and gas stations in order to determine the potential damage of different accelerations of the ground. Finally, seismic loss estimation was performed for hospitals understudy based on risk analysis maps. The results showed that the average damage to hospitals in the first and second earthquake scenarios is 42% and 23%, respectively. Among the building components, the most damages are for fuel tanks and the least for gas stations. The overall probability of damage following the first earthquake scenario is higher than the second scenario due to the proximity of the fault to the hospitals in Yazd. The results of the study can be useful in reducing earthquake risk in hospitals.

The occurrence of floods as a threat to human life seems to be increasing; thus, all sectors of the community should participate in flood risk management to understand and control the underlying factors affecting flood deaths. This qualitative study used content analysis method with a conventional approach to identify the underlying factors influencing flood deaths from the perspective of different social groups. The participants who had directly or indirectly witnessed flood deaths were amongst ordinary flood-affected people, academic groups, and disaster management authorities in different parts of Iran. The data collection was performed using in-depth interviews with 31 individuals and 7 focused group discussions. Purposeful sampling was adopted and continued until data saturation. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded by the research team after selecting the participants. Data analysis was performed to extract and categorize the effective factors on flood death using conventional content analysis method where coding categories were derived directly from the text data. The results of this study indicated that a wide range of factors affect the deaths caused by floods including the categories of hazard-related features, cultural, economic, social, demographic, management and physical factors. These seven categories covered 27 subcategories and 167 factors. The participants of this study referred to different codes at total 926 times. The completeness of the factors suggested that flood risk management and reduction require a variety of strategies and tactics. These include planning, training, promotion of culture of prevention, awareness, recognition and readiness, coordination, cooperation.

The probability of earthquake in Tehran, large population and congestion in this city and unequal distribution of the population has increased the vulnerability of Tehran to the earthquake. One of the methods for reducing vulnerability is development of Disaster Preparedness Behavior (DPB). Fatalistic beliefs have a special effect on DPB. This study has evaluated the prevalence of religious and fatalistic beliefs to explain the people's needs in decreasing vulnerability and promoting their DPB during earthquakes. This study was a survey from October 21 to November 7, 2013. Data was gathered using questionnaire and survey during two weeks in 22 regions of Tehran. The study population consisted of the Tehran citizens aged ≥18 years old. Sampling was performed by Probability Proportional Size (PPS) sampling. A total of 1312 samples were included in the study. Among those participants who answered the question indicating their religion 99.5 %(963 persons) stated that they were Muslims. While 68.9% of participants had religious attitude toward earthquake crisis management, 57.9% did not have fatalistic views in this regard. However, 48.2% of participants expressed scientific approach toward earthquake crisis management.. In order to control fatalistic beliefs in earthquake disaster management and promote the people's DPB, the managers and policymakers are required to adopt proper strategies in this regard to increase education and train people to behave correctly, associate with their religious beliefs.