Turkey’s new virus figures confirm experts’ worst fears

ANKARA: When Turkey changed the way it reports daily Covid-19 infections, it confirmed what medical groups and opposition parties have long suspected – that the country is faced with an alarming surge of cases that is fast exhausting the Turkish health system.

In an about-face, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government this week resumed reporting all positive coronavirus tests – not just the number of patients being treated for symptoms – pushing the number of daily cases to above 30,000.

With the new data, the country jumped from being one of the least-affected countries in Europe to one of the worst-hit.

That came as no surprise to the Turkish Medical Association, which has been warning for months that the government’s previous figures were concealing the graveness of the spread and that the lack of transparency was contributing to the surge.

The group maintains, however, that the ministry’s figures are still low compared with its estimate of at least 50,000 new infections per day.

No country can report exact numbers on the spread of the disease since many asymptomatic cases go undetected, but the previous way of counting made Turkey look relatively well-off in international comparisons, with daily new cases far below those reported in European countries including Italy, Britain and France. That changed on Wednesday as Turkey’s daily caseload almost quadrupled from about 7,400 to 28,300.

Hospitals are overstretched, medical staff are burned out and contract tracers are struggling to track transmissions, said Sebnem Korur Fincanci, who heads the association. “It’s the perfect storm,” he said. Even though the health minister has put the ICU bed occupancy rate at 70%, Ebru Kiraner, who heads the Istanbul-based Intensive Care Nurses’ Association, says intensive care unit beds in Istanbul’s hospitals are almost full, with doctors scrambling to find room for critically ill patients.

“ICU nurses have not been able to return to their normal lives since March. Their children have not seen their mask-less faces in months,” she said. — AP