Turkey’s COVID-19 recoveries exceed current number of patients
Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced on Saturday that Turkey’s daily COVID-19 death toll has dropped to 61, while the number of recovered patients has exceeded the number of current coronavirus patients for the first time
4,892 more patients recovered on Sunday bringing the total number of recoveries to 63,151.
The total number of fatalities has reached 3,397 as 61 more people died over the past 24 hours.
24,001 tests have been conducted over the past 24 hours, with 1,670 new cases registered, bringing the tally to 126,045,
Turkey has carried out over 1.13 million COVID-19 tests so far.
The number of patients still in intensive care stands at 1,424. Some 766 patients remain intubated.
“We will achieve even better results if we continue to abide by the precautionary advice,” Koca said on Twitter.
According to this article in Gerçek Fethiye, shopping malls closed due to the coronavirus are preparing to gradually re-open from May 11.
Strict social distancing measures will be in place to continue to curb the spread of the virus. The measures include:
– Thermal cameras at the entrances. Anyone with a high temperature will not be allowed in. – Customers will not be allowed to circulate freely in the shopping malls. – Shoppers will enter stores in single file and follow a pre-determined route marked around stores with arrows. – Shoppers will not be allowed to double back to any location they have already passed. – An alarm will sound if social distancing measures are not adhered to.
Guidelines will be issued by the Scientific Board as to which shops can open and when.
We will continue to bring you updates as we receive them.
Turkey will conduct tests to trace “ghost spreaders,” who have the coronavirus but do not show any symptoms of the COVID-19 disease, according to Professor Ateş Kara, a member of the country’s Science Board.
“Data suggest that some 30 percent of the coronavirus cases in the countries around the world are those “ghost spreaders,” which mean asymptomatic virus carriers.” Kara said.
He noted that Iceland tested everyone in the country and found that around a third of the population had the disease with no symptoms.
“A later study from China and data from other countries show similar results, which allow us to make some estimates about Turkey,” Kara explained.
“That is why we urge everybody to wear face masks but putting on a mask is no substitute for social distancing.”
Kara noted that it would be impossible to track all those ghost spreaders, but newly developed tests produce more accurate results.
“We cannot carry out the tests on the entire populations, however, we try to find those ghost spreaders by running tests on certain sample groups. From now on, tests will be conducted in crowded workplaces,” he said.
Turkey uses what it calls the “filiation” method to screen the chain of contacts in infectious diseases. If somebody tests positive, close contacts are also tested. There are more than 4,000 filiation teams tracing people that may have contracted the virus.
What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? It has happened before
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Most experts remain confident that a Covid-19 vaccine will eventually be developed; in part because, unlike previous diseases like HIV and malaria, the coronavirus does not mutate rapidly.
But the possibility that a vaccine may not be found is taken very seriously by many experts – because it’s happened before. Several times.
This article from CNN takes a look at what happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed…
