TURKEY CUTS COVID-19 TESTING TO WOO TOURISTS AND SAVE AILING ECONOMY
▶ Country imposed lockdown to bring cases down in time for summer
A dramatic drop in the number of Covid-19 tests being carried out in Turkey is masking the extent of the disease’s spread, health experts said.
From a high of more than 63,000 cases a day in mid-April, the number of registered infections fell to fewer than 25,000 on Monday.
Turkey entered its strictest lockdown four days earlier, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stating the daily rate must be brought below 5,000 to salvage this summer’s vital tourism season.
But the fall in cases has been accompanied by a corresponding drop in daily testing, from a peak of more than 322,000 on April 20 to fewer than 242,000 on Tuesday.
“A decline in contact between people is generally expected because of restrictions,” Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said. “Consequently, the number of people going to clinics and the number of tests conducted by tracing teams are declining.”
But doctors disputed his statement.
“Fahrettin Koca’s opinion is false,” said Ahmet Bulut, general secretary of the Turkish Medical Association.
“The implementation of testing is limited. Just six months ago, when you were in contact with a Covid-19 case you had the right to a PCR test. But now, if you have contact with a family member or workmate who had Covid-19 and you ask for a test they say no because you need symptoms to be tested.
“We know 80 per cent of people infected by this disease are asymptomatic.”
A March update by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the best estimate of asymptomatic cases was 30 per cent. It said data on the ratio was “uncertain”.
Ahmet Saltik, professor of public health at Ankara University, also rejected the health minister’s claim.
“Epidemiologically and biologically, such a dramatic decrease is not possible,” he said.
“It is definitely obvious that the data are manipulated on a huge scale.
“I don’t agree with the minister’s statement, as a senior expert who has spent his life on this issue. Maybe he is a fortune teller and can see the future? Or maybe he is better than the scientists that we have. Or will they just simply manipulate the numbers in advance to open the country up to tourism?”
The Turkish government hopes a holiday revival will ease the country’s $37 billion current account deficit. Tourism revenue accounts for 12 per cent of the economy, which was under pressure long before the pandemic.
Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy placed his faith in the daily cases dropping below the magic 5,000 mark when he said this week he hopes for 30 million visitors this summer.
Last year, tourism generated $12bn, a 65 per cent drop on the record $35bn set in 2019.
The industry suffered a further blow when Russia announced a halt to tourist flights until June 1, which the Turkish government said would mean 500,000 fewer travellers. Moscow said the ban could be extended.
In a bid to attract tourists, Ankara said visitors from 15 countries, including the UK, China and Ukraine, would not require a negative test result to enter.
Taylan Buyuksahin, economics editor at the Sozcu newspaper, said Turkey was dependent on foreign income from exports and tourism.
“For Turkey, tourism is a factory without chimneys,” he said. “They can’t close it down. To convince and send a message to countries where many tourists come from, such as the UK and Russia, they announced this lockdown.”
The 17-day curfew sparked what the Istanbul Medical Chamber called a “mass migration” of city residents to coastal regions as hundreds of thousands headed to the Aegean and Mediterranean – the destinations to which Turkey hopes swarms of foreign tourists will arrive when it ends.
“They carried the mutant-variant viruses to those areas,” Prof Saltik said. “We will see the terrible results of this Covid migration after two weeks.”
Domestic tourists will return to cities after the lockdown, spreading variants.
This pattern could be repeated on an international scale with the arrival of foreigners, increasing the strain on health care, Prof Bulut said.
“Maybe they imagine they might cheat the world but, no, they can’t.”