TEHRAN -- Covid infections in Iran surged again Wednesday, hitting a new one-day record for a third straight day and taking total cases to more than four million.
Iran registered 39,357 new cases in the 24 hours to Wednesday, taking the total since the pandemic started to 4,019,084, the health ministry said.
It recorded 409 deaths over the same period taking the total in Iran to 92,194.
Choked by U.S. sanctions that have made it difficult to transfer money abroad, Iran says it is struggling to import vaccines for its 83 million population.
More than 11 million people have been given a first vaccine dose, but only 2.8 million have received the necessary two jabs, the ministry said.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Monday ordered that “necessary measures” be taken to contain what the government warns is a “fifth wave” of the country’s outbreak.
President Ebrahim Raisi chaired a meeting of Iran’s Covid task force for the first time Wednesday just a day after his inauguration, his office said.
The former government avoided imposing a full lockdown on the population, and instead resorted to piecemeal measures such as temporary travel bans and business closures.
The new surge has been fueled by the contagious delta variant, and Iranian authorities say less than 40% of the population follows measures such as wearing face masks and social distancing. Iranian health officials have regularly warned that hospitals in the capital, Tehran, and other major cities are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.
The former government put capital Tehran and neighboring Alborz under complete lockdown for six days in late July, but it was deemed mostly pointless as hardly any businesses closed down and travel restrictions were flouted amid low enforcement of protocols.
The situation has gotten significantly worse since then, but health officials have warned that the fifth wave of infections has yet to reach its peak.
Alireza Raisi, the spokesman of the national anti-coronavirus task force, said on Saturday that 29 of Iran’s 31 provinces are now in the throes of the Delta variant and hospital beds are quickly being filled.
Hundreds of cities across the country are now classified “red” in a color-coded scale denoting the severity of outbreaks.

Iran’s vaccine rollout has accelerated in the past two weeks as several more million doses have been imported after months of lag that officials said was due to U.S. sanctions and missed deadlines by other countries.
So far, jabs have been imported from China, Russia, India, Cuba, and COVAX, the global vaccine effort.
But still, according to the health ministry, only about 10 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine in a country of more than 83 million.
People aged above 55 can currently sign up at the health ministry website to be inoculated.
Officials say more than half a million doses of COVIran Barekat, the country’s first locally developed vaccine, have also been administered across the country so far.
Local vaccines are expected to be rolled out in larger numbers during the next few months to fill the gaps left by lackluster imports.
Iran has several other vaccine candidates in the works, including one jab developed by an organization under the defense ministry, one under the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and one being developed by the private sector.