Iranian health ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur attacked the Tehran city council for “politicizing” the coronavirus pandemic at a Wednesday press conference in response to accusations that his ministry was concealing the true death toll of the disease.

Iran’s daily coronavirus statistics are increasingly a matter of life-and-death and the country uses them to weight the success of a program to lift quarantine measures and reopen the economy. But voices inside and outside Iran—including the city council of Iran’s capital—have accused the government of underreporting the number of people infected and killed by the novel coronavirus.

Tehran council chairman Mohsen Hashemi had warned on Sunday against ending quarantine measures, claiming that “actual numbers are several times higher than what is being announced by the government.”

The health ministry stopped releasing province-by-province statistics on coronavirus infections and deaths last week. That same week, a report commissioned by Iran’s parliament claimed the government was undercounting coronavirus cases by an order of magnitude due to a lack of sufficient testing.

President Hassan Rouhani implied that death rates have increased in some provinces in a Wednesday speech.

“We must be grateful for the efforts in the provinces where [the epidemic] has been on a downward trend for two or three weeks,” he said. “Some of the provinces have seen an upward trend in recent days, and conditions have changed somewhat. Of course, we still have a problem in a few provinces that we need to be careful about.”

Jahanpur, however, pushed back against the Tehran city council.

“Go ask the city council officials about the ambiguity in statistics…Certainly, they themselves have a convincing answer,” Jahanpur told reporters on Wednesday. “We think that everyone should speak to their field of expertise. If they say that the Ministry of Health is not the source of coronavirus statistics, they should announce it themselves.”

The health ministry spokesman claimed that Iran’s statistics are based on “laboratory results,” and that no country gets its statistics from mortuaries.

“Some different political factions are looking to politicize the coronavirus epidemic,” Jahanpur told reporters. “They ignore Iran’s success, which is better than many developed countries, at managing this epidemic.”

He compared the situation to the Iraqi invasion of Iran in the 1980s: “it is like this, some people are fighting the occupation of Khorramshahr or the siege of Abadan, but some say that you are announcing too many or too few martys.”

Other members of the city council similarly accused the government of a coverup last week. Nahid Khodakarami had estimated that between seventy and one hundred people die of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) every day in Tehran alone.

Iran’s official daily death toll hovers around 94.

U.S. President Donald Trump has also doubted Iran’s statistics, giving the controversy an international angle.

“They were hit very hard,” he said. “Obviously, those numbers weren't correct numbers that they reported.”

According to official statistics released on Wednesday, the coronavirus had killed 94 people and infected 1,194 more people in the previous 24 hours. The total number of confirmed cases stands at 85,996, including 5,391 deaths and 63,113 recovered patients.

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @matthew_petti.