Speaking on Thursday at the session of the Government"s Economic Board for looking into the impacts of the outbreak of coronavirus, President said that the government has considered low-interest loans for those businesses that have been hit by the outbreak of the virus.

Parts of Dr Hassan Rouhani"s speech is as follows:

In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful

In the issue of coronavirus, we had to work hard in two important sectors, one of which was health, in which we made good decisions on the premise of worst case scenario.

Today, tens of thousands of beds are ready throughout the country, which are roughly not used.

We have also prepared 4 thousand hospital beds of the armed forces, which have not been used so far.

Therefore, today, we have a very large number of beds that have not been used so far. I would like to thank the excellent planning that has been done in this regard.

Our doctors and nurses, who were very tired in the first days, can now rest more with the new 10 thousand nurses added.

From today, stricter regulations will be implemented for social distancing so that we can become more confident that we can break the chain of coronavirus outbreak.

Nothing will be done at the expense of the other, that means we will do whatever we need in the health sector, and in the economic sector, we will do our best to make things easier for the people.

We have made decisions in this regard in addition to the decisions made in the previous session. We have considered about 6 trillion tomans of credit, which will be allocated.

The first decision we made today was regarding the businesses that have been affected by the coronavirus. We will allocated low-interest loans for businesses that have been affected and not fired any labourer.

We will provide the service and production businesses with 75 trillion tomans of loans with a preferential rate of 12 per cent, with the return period of 2 years.

In addition to this, there are some cases that we need to use the unemployment insurance fund.

There is an amount that the health sector needs, which the Plan and Budget Organisation has looked into. Hopefully, we will send a letter and we hope that the Supreme Leader agrees with allocating $1bn from the National Development Fund.

Therefore, I assure the dear people of Iran that the government is paying a lot of attention to the economic sector and people"s lives and health.

Fortunately, the country"s production is in good state and our storages are enough to provide for the needs of the people.

I hope that God helps us so that we can overcome this problem faster. Inshallah.

Wassalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh