Istanbul accounts for almost half of all COVID-19 cases in Turkey

ISTANBUL

More than 223,000 people have contracted COVID-19 to date in Turkey and Istanbul, the country’s largest city population, accounting for 46 percent of all cases, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said.

He also noted a little more than 50 percent of all coronavirus-related deaths occurred in the city, which is home to around 16 million inhabitants.

Some 150,000 people have been randomly tested for COVID-19 across the country by the Health Ministry and the results showed that every 2.5 person out of 1,000 tested have the virus, Fahrettin Koca said on July 24 on Twitter. The corresponding figure for Istanbul is 2.9 person out of 1,000 which is nearly 14 percent higher than the national average, he added.

Turkey has conducted nearly 4.5 million tests since the start of the outbreak with more than 43,000 tests alone on July 23.

“The number of people under age 65 among the 1,043 patients we lost due to COVID-19 since June 1 is 136,” Koca said in a tweet on July 23.

He also said that the cities with the highest number of cases in the last three days are the capital Ankara along with Konya, Şanlıurfa, Batman, Adana, Kayseri, and Erzurum with Istanbul absent from the list.