Tehran, Jan 31 (IANS): Iranian President Hassan Rouhani reiterated the necessity for people to abide by health protocols, or the country would face another wave of COVID-19 within the next two months, official news agency IRNA reported.

Rouhani made the remarks during a meeting of the national anti-Covid-19 headquarters on Saturday, Xinhua news agency reported.

He said that Iran has taken the primary steps to develop and produce the Covid-19 vaccine and the country's experts are confident that the project will be finalized in March so that Iran will begin mass vaccination with the domestically-produced vaccine.

Meanwhile, Kianoush Jahanpour, spokesman for Food and Drug Administration of Iran, on Saturday tweeted the approval of emergency use of Russia's Sputnik V vaccines in Iran.

Iranian health authorities raised the country's overall count of Covid-19 infections to 1,411,731 on Saturday, after 6,317 new cases were registered in the past 24 hours, IRNA reported.

The spokeswoman for Iran's Ministry of Health and Medical Education Sima Sadat Lari said at her daily briefing that 506 of the newly infected had to be hospitalized.

She said 82 new deaths from the coronavirus were registered, raising the death toll to 57,889 in the country. And 1,202,893 cases have so far recovered or been released from hospitals.

The mortality due to the virus and the number of the hospitalized declined in the past week, but the level of compliance with health protocols is also downwards, Sadat Lari warned.

Iran announced its first cases of Covid-19 on February 19, 2020.