Turkey sees sharp decline in virus cases thanks to vaccine drive

ISTANBUL

The number of COVID-19 cases, people being treated in hospitals for the coronavirus and patients in intensive care units (ICU) declined across Turkey in the span of a week after the country’s vaccination drive against the outbreak began gaining momentum.

“The end of the pandemic comes with vaccines. Get your vaccine to look at tomorrow more confidently than today,” Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter, disclosing the number of average cases per population of 100,000 on a provincial basis.

The first three provinces with the highest decrease in the number of cases in the last week were the Black Sea province of Gümüşhane, the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir and the Black Sea province of Artvin, according to the weekly cases’ data shared by Koca for June 26 and July 2.

The figures also showed that the weekly number of COVID-19 cases decreased in the capital Ankara and İzmir, while it increased in Istanbul, the country’s most crowded metropolis with an over 16 million population.

In Istanbul, the number of weekly cases rose to around 54.60, from 54.30 in the previous week, while it was 71.99 for Ankara which had only around 83.64 cases per 100,000 people before. The number of cases per 100,000 people was 23.51 in İzmir, slumping from a week earlier.

There are approximately 7,800 active cases of COVID-19 in Istanbul, 4,000 in Ankara, and around 1,000 in İzmir, according to these data.

The eastern province of Ağrı, with 155 cases, the eastern province of Siirt, with 105 cases, and its neighboring province of Bitlis, with 101 cases, per 100,000 people are still in the top three among the provinces that are still red, a color signifying the high-risk provinces on the figures.

The country also confirmed 5,299 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, and 37 deaths, while as many as 4,446 more patients have won the battle against the virus.

Turkey a week ago moved to the normalization phase, lifting almost all virus-related restrictions across the country including weekend lockdowns and night curfews while allowing restaurants and cafes to open.