Turkey‘s confirmed cases of the coronavirus increased by 2,576 in the past 24 hours, and 85 more people have died, taking the death toll to 10,972, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Nov. 9.
Turkey’s total confirmed cases stood at 396,831, according to the infographic Koca shared on Twitter.
Some 2,047 patients recovered in the last 24 hours, the minister said.
The total number of recovered cases stood at 340,286.
Koca also said 145,411 tests were conducted over the past day, with the overall number of tests reaching 15,273,222.
The minister also added that while the rate of pneumonia in COVID-19 patients is 4.2 percent, the number of seriously ill patients is 2,867.
In the face of a spike in the number of coronavirus patients, the government has recently announced a series of measures that came into force last week.
Under the new rules, indoor facilities, such as cafes, restaurants, shopping malls, markets, barbershops, sports centers, internet cafes, theaters, cinemas, and concert halls will now close at 10:00 p.m. in all 81 provinces of Turkey.
Industrial workers in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, started their shift at 7 a.m. yesterday as part of the flexible working hour arrangement.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had announced earlier this month that flexible working hours would be encouraged in private and public sectors across the country.
Elsewhere in Turkey, the movement of people aged 65 and older have been restricted in the eastern province of Erzurum. Elderly people in the city are now allowed to venture outside between 10:00 a.m and 4 p.m.
Nearly 70 percent of the people surveyed by polling company Ipsos has said that they were not happy with the country’s “normalization phase.” Only 18 percent of the polled said that the normalization phase in Turkey was “going well.”
More than 50 percent of the people believed they would inevitably contract COVID-19, while 21 percent were confident that they would not get the virus.
The survey also found that 65 percent of the public supported the idea of imposing weekend curfew across the country while 21 backed lockdowns in selected provinces. Some 9 percent of the polled outright rejected the idea of imposing curfews.
Hurriyet Daily News