Software developer finds three times more excess deaths than Turkey's official Covid-19 toll

Images: Ministry of Health's risk map

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A software developer says that he has found nearly 44,000 excess deaths in 24 provinces that make up 58 percent of Turkey's population.

The Ministry of Health's death toll, on the other hand, just surpassed 15,000 with 203 new additions yesterday (December 7).

Based on municipalities' announcements and figures on the e-government website, Güçlü Yaman examined death figures in 16 larger cities, eight provincial centers and three districts to find that many excess deaths "to provide an alternative source."

"According to the average of the past years, this means a 30 percent increase. Considering that the rate of increase in deaths was 1.5 percent in recent years, there is a terrible difference," says Yaman.

Medical organizations, including the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), and opposition parties have criticized the government for not being transparent about Covid-19 figures since the start of the outbreak.

While the government denies the claims and says its response to the pandemic has been a "success story," it had to admit in late September that it was not including asymptomatic cases in its daily count.

On November 25, the Ministry of Health started to announce all cases and symptomatic cases separately and has been reporting more than 30,000 daily cases since then.

CLICK - Turkish Medical Association: Turkey still underreports Covid-19 cases despite change in reporting

As the official death figures have also been disputed, the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality has been announcing the number of deaths caused by "an infectious disease" in the city since November 22.

The ministry's death toll for the entire country and the municipality's death toll for İstanbul have been similar so far.

"I consider all officially announced figures to be lies until proven otherwise. Deaths from June to the end of August form a straight line. This is not normally possible," says Yaman. "According to the death figures I have, there are both an increase and zig-zags.

In the southern Hatay province, which was one of the five provinces that Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca said were "under risk," three times more deaths occured between November 25 and December 1, compared to the average of the previous two years, Yaman notes.

"If the cases are increasing somewhere, the deaths will also increase after a few weeks. If measures need to be taken and people should be warned, it should be done when the cases start to increase," he says. (DŞ/VK)