Baku, April 14, AZERTAC

The number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus has significantly dropped in Turkiye, with some hospitals starting to close down their wards dedicated to battling the deadly infection, according to Daily Sabah.

It has been two years since Turkiye faced the steep risk of the coronavirus, with the number of cases snowballing.

The country was forced to build new hospitals in Istanbul exclusively to handle the mounting number of cases. For months, health care workers were forced to work long shifts, with no contact with their families.

Over the past few weeks, the number of cases has drastically dropped and as of Wednesday, it was 5,529, far below the more than 100,000 just two months ago. Mass vaccination and the prevalence of omicron, a less-severe strain of the coronavirus, are credited with decreasing the number of cases.

In Istanbul, Turkiye’s most populated city, which was also the city with highest number of cases once, local health authorities hail the current state in the pandemic. The city now has only about 196 cases per every 100,000 people, according to the figures from the last week of March. Moreover, most cases are patients who recover after self-isolation.

Professor Kemal Memişoğlu, head of the Directorate of Health in the city, said the cases have reached the “lowest levels since the pandemic began.”

Memişoğlu said that the number of positive cases was the highest in January, since the beginning of the pandemic in Turkey in March 2020 but what followed was not a mass hospitalization. “On the contrary, it was only one in six infected people who required hospitalization,” he noted. Memişoğlu added that the figures were still decreasing.

He noted that the city had some 13,000 more hospital beds during the course of the pandemic, thanks to opening of nine new hospitals, and did not face any problems at the peak of the pandemic.