Photo: AA
The Ministry of Health was not reporting the number of asymptomatic Covid-19 cases and was including "patients, not cases" in its daily figures table, Minister Fahrettin Koca said last night (September 30).
Koca's statement came after the revelation of a ministry document showing nearly 20 times more cases for a day than the official figures.
"Every case is not a patient. We are talking about people with symptoms," he told reporters after he was asked about the issue during a press conference following a meeting with the ministry's science board. "As of July 29, we started to announce it as 'the number of patients'."
When asked by reporters whether the ministry was only announcing the number of hospitalized patients, Koca said the number of all patients with symptoms, hospitalized or not, was included in ministry figures.
After Koca's statement, #vaksayisikac (What is the number of cases?) hashtag became a "trending topic" on Twitter in Turkey.
MP Murat Emir from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) on Tuesday (September 29) revealed a document from the ministry's internal laboratory system, which showed that 29,377 new Covid-19 cases were found on September 10 whereas the ministry reported 1,512 "patients" on that day.
Emir also pointed out the change in the ministry announcements from the number of "cases" to "patients" and said it was aimed at concealing the real numbers.
Doctors' organizations and health workers' unions have disputed the ministry's official figures since the start of the outbreak.
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Statement by the Turkish Medical Association
The Turkish Medical Association (TTB) released a statement on Twitter after Koca's remarks, saying, "We have been saying this for six months. You haven't run the process transparently. You have concealed the truth. You haven't prevented the spread of the disease."
TTB Central Committee Chair Şebnem Korur-Fincancı also shared a message with the #vakasayisikac hashtag, saying that "The truth is our right."
Prof. Sinan Adıyaman, the previous TTB chair, called on Koca to resign from his position as the Minister of Health.
The TTB had previously revealed that the ministry had not been using the mortality codes recommended by the World Health Organization, hence the real death toll was higher than official figures.
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Nearly 1,400 "patients" for today
The Ministry of Health reported 1,391 new Covid-19 patients and 1,245 recoveries for the past 24 hours.
The death toll from the virus reached 8,195, with 65 more fatalities.
The country's overall case/patient count now stands at 318,663, with recoveries totaling 279,749, according to Health Ministry data.
Nearly 112,098 more coronavirus tests were conducted over the past 24 hours, bringing the overall tally to over 10.38 million.
The daily number of deaths, cases/patients, recoveries and tests reported by the ministry since the start of the outbreak:
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