Turkey tightens restrictions to curb coronavirus outbreak
As the death toll from COVID-19 reached 37 and cases spread across the country, Turkey pledged to accelerate diagnostic and treatment methods, while introducing new measures to keep people at home, though it has stopped short of a full lockdown.
ISTANBUL — Turkey introduced additional restrictions today to keep people at home and contain the coronavirus outbreak as the number of confirmed cases mounted rapidly and spread throughout the country. The government also pledged to ramp up diagnostic testing, production of ventilators and efforts to find a vaccine.
Seven people died from COVID-19 Tuesday, raising the death toll to 44, and the official number of cases has reached 1,872, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter. At a news conference on Monday he said cases have been recorded “across all of Turkey” and acknowledged that local transmission of the virus now exceeds direct or indirect infection from overseas.
Turkey distributed a new drug from China to 40 cities today that promises to reduce the treatment of the disease to just four days but has not disclosed the name of the medicine. China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged late last year, is also providing Turkey with up to 1 million fast-acting diagnostic kits to expand testing, which has been conducted on 24,000 patients to date.
The Interior Ministry announced new rules for grocery stores and public transportation, limiting supermarkets’ operating hours to between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. and customers to one person per 10 square meters of floor space. Buses within towns and between cities are only allowed to sell tickets at half capacity under the decree.
