Turkey builds more hospitals as coronavirus cases spike
More than 30,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 less than a month since it was confirmed to have reached Turkey as the government continues to resist imposing a full lockdown.
ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised on Monday to expand the number of hospital beds in Istanbul, the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, as the disease claimed another 75 lives despite tighter restrictions on residents to enforce social distancing.
The latest deaths raised the toll from COVID-19 in Turkey to 649 people, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter. The number of confirmed cases in the last 24 hours increased by 3,148 to 30,217, placing Turkey ninth among the nations with the highest number of cases. The world has counted 1.29 million cases and nearly 71,000 deaths since the virus emerged in China in December.
The government has gradually tightened restrictions, cancelling all international and domestic flights by Turkish carriers and quarantining a reported 128 residential areas across half of the country’s provinces. Parliament will vote this week on a bill that will free or consign to house arrest almost a third of the country’s nearly 300,000 inmates, though hundreds of jailed journalists, politicians and rights activists are excluded from the amnesty.
Yet opposition politicians and some medical professionals say the steep rise in new cases, one of the highest in the world, will continue unless the government calls for a full lockdown, like those in many European nations. Erdogan said on Monday the failure by the United States and Europe to take more decisive action to contain the outbreak had pitched the world into the crisis it now faces.
