ISTANBUL—The severity of Turkey’s coronavirus outbreak was called into question after the government acknowledged it wasn’t counting asymptomatic cases, triggering criticism from local medical professionals and prompting the U.K. on Friday to toughen quarantine requirements for travelers coming from the country.
The growing controversy comes as Turkey, which has recorded more than 8,000 deaths from the virus, is trying to reboot a tourism industry hit hard by months of lockdown and air-travel disruption.
“The Turkish Health Ministry has been defining the number of new COVID-19 cases in a different way to the definition used by international organizations such as the World Health Organization,” U.K. Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps said. “So we have updated our risk assessment for the country.”
Since the coronavirus pandemic reached the country in March, the Turkish Health Ministry has published a daily compilation of the number of tests performed, hospitalizations, deaths and other key information.
Istanbul police patrol Taksim Square on Sept. 26. to ensure residents wear face masks.
Photo:
murad sezer/Reuters
In late July, the ministry changed the label of the closely watched category called “new cases,” which hovered around 900 a day—a relatively low level for the country of 83 million—to “new patients.” In an ensuing briefing, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the modification had been made to better reflect internationally accepted terminologies.
At the time, the change in the daily table and the minister’s explanation went largely unnoticed. This week, however, questions arose after an opposition lawmaker in a tweet called on the government to clarify whether it had minimized the severity of the outbreak by publishing data on the number of patients rather than all positive cases.
Mr. Koca acknowledged in a news briefing Wednesday that, since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, his office hadn’t reported the number of cases in its daily table, but only the number of patients with symptoms who have been hospitalized.
During another briefing on Thursday, Mr. Koca lambasted those who make “irresponsible criticisms,” saying that focusing on asymptomatic cases would be a waste of time. While the Health Ministry doesn’t include those cases in its daily figures, he said the ministry is tracking them as part of its contact and tracing system and is asking them to self-quarantine. “This group does not have primary importance for the pandemics anymore,” Mr. Koca said.
The lawmaker who questioned Mr. Koca, Murat Emir of the opposition Republican People’s Party, said the ministry was trying to hide its misstep behind lengthy and technical declarations. “The number of cases is much higher,” said Mr. Emir.
Turkish doctors, who have long complained that official data didn’t match with their real-life observations, said they were appalled.
“They didn’t manage this process transparently,” said Halis Yerlikaya, a senior member of the Turkish Medical Association, the country’s main doctors union. “The Ministry is controlling the numbers instead of controlling the pandemic.”
Serap Yavuz Simsek, a doctor and a member of the scientific council advising the government on how to combat the coronavirus, urged authorities to release all available numbers, including new cases.
“It is crucial that data is shared transparently because when people have questions on their minds, they lose thrust and it will be harder to control the pandemic,” she said. “There is no need to shy away from this because the whole world is suffering like we do.”
Write to David Gauthier-Villars at David.Gauthier-Villars@wsj.com
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