Reports confirm Turkey’s strategy to hide true coronavirus figures

 Turkey has long been accused of hiding the true coronavirus figures and recent months have seen the country change it easy of reporting the virus counts. Experts feared that this will result in a surge of cases in the country if Ankara continues to have a loose approach and their concerns seem to be true.

A report in the Associated press tells that the country has been witnessing an alarming surge of cases of covid-19. This issue was raised by the opposition and medical groups when they realized that Turkey has not been taking any measures to control the virus spread and in fact it is choosing to hide the actual data.

The biggest concern due to this surge is that the medical system of Turkey is quickly exhausting. This week, there was a change made in the way Turkey has been reporting its coronavirus cases. The President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government earlier used to just reveal the number of patients being treated for symptoms but now it has started reporting positive cases. 

Due to this, actual data came into public knowledge and soon Turkey became one of the worst-hit European countries which was once part of the least affected list. But that information may come as a surprise to other countries but for the Turkish Medical Association, it is not a matter of surprise.

The Association has already warned the Turkish government and accused them of concealing the figures in order to hide the graveness of the spread. The medical association even now claims that the estimates projected by the government are still low compared to what are the ground realties. They have said that the current estimate is of nearly 50,000 new cases per day compared to what the Erdogan administration said of 30,000 cases.

Recent cases have shown that it is impossible to give out the exact number of people infected of the covid-19 virus as a lot of the time, the patients also go asymptomatic and even through PCR test, the virus cannot be detected. But Turkey portrayed its counting in such a way that it looked pretty well-off when compared to other European countries.

That however changed when Turkey’s daily infection rates increased from 7,400 to 28,300. The AP report suggested that the hospitals in the country are struggling. The medical staff, the healthcare systems are unable to manage the surge of new cases. One of the senior officials of the association Sebnem Korur Fincanci said that even the contract tracers are not able trace the infections to the severity of it.

Fincanci belongs to one of the groups which has repeatedly questioned government’s figures and their response to the covid-19 pandemic. He called the situation in Turkey a ‘perfect storm’.

Erdogan sticking to his usual behavior continues to deny any problem faced by the hospitals, He has put the whole blame on the public’s failure to wear masks and abide by the social distancing rules.

The Mayor of Istanbul stood against Erdogan’s claims saying that giving out true infection fgres would not make Turkey lose its shine. He said on November 22 itself, 186 people died within the city while the government claimed that just 139 people lost their lives in the whole country. He added, “We can only beat the outbreak through a process that is transparent. Russia and Germany have announced a high death toll. Did Germany lose its shine? Did Russia collapse?”