How Turkey handled COVID-19: partial lockdowns, hydroxychloroquine, and keeping patients off ventilators
Mark Crispin Miller
Coronavirus: How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52831017
Covid-19 came late to Turkey - on 11 March - but soon singed every corner of the country. Within a month all 81 provinces had been affected.
It was the one of the fastest growing outbreaks in the world - worse than China or the UK. There were fears that the death toll would soar turning Turkey into another Italy, which was then the hardest hit country.
Three months on that hasn't happened, even without a total lockdown.
The official death toll is 4,397. Some doctors here dispute that, claiming the real figure could be twice as high because Turkey only includes those who test positive. Either way, in the horrific annals of the Covid-19 era, it's a relatively low number for a population of 83 million.
An unusual lockdown
Experts warn it is hard to reach conclusions and compare statistics while countries are still burying their dead. But Turkey has "clearly averted a much bigger disaster", according to Dr Jeremy Rossman, Lecturer in Virology at the University of Kent.
"Turkey fits in the category of several countries that responded fairly quickly with testing, tracing, isolation and movement restrictions," he told the BBC. "It's a fairly small club of countries that have been quite effective in reducing the viral spread."
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