Turkey authorities to start reporting full COVID-19 figures after massive backlash

Turkey's health minister Fahrettin Koca has said that the country will start reporting its total number of COVID-19 cases later this week. According to reports, the move comes as Ankara faced widespread condemnation for only releasing figures for patients showing symptoms of infection. Koca told a local newspaper Hurriyet that Turkey will include asymptomatic cases from October 15, which would be further shared with the World Health Organisation.

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1,649 new cases

The health minister, last month, revealed that Turkey had been publishing only the daily number of patients showing symptoms of COVID-19 which resulted in widespread criticism from opposition leaders and health care workers that had earlier questioned the accuracy of the statistics. 

According to the reports, the latest daily figures showed 1,649 new patients and 56 fatalities on Saturday, October 10. The country so far has reported more than 334,000 cases and 8,778 fatalities since the virus outbreak. 

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When the pandemic struck in March, the government imposed a number of restrictions to keep a lid on infections that inevitably hurt the economy. In addition to ordering a lockdown on some businesses, it imposed weekend curfews, closed borders, and restricted domestic travel. Many of the restrictions were lifted in June, in hopes that the economy would rebound strongly in the third quarter. However, tourism levels have been way lower than in previous years.

As per reports, the official figures showed that Turkey’s economy contracted 9.9% in the second quarter of the year from the previous three-month period in the wake of lockdown measures put in place to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the quarterly decline in the April to June period reported by the Turkish Statistical Institute saw the country's biggest contraction in more than a decade, it was slightly less than economists had predicted.

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Image/Inputs: AP