Since the beginning of the normalization process on June 1, the number of COVID-19 cases has been on the increase in Turkey. Public health specialist and soL news columnist İlker Belek evaluated the recent course of coronavirus pandemic over the number of active cases. Saying that the number of active cases is calculated by subtracting those who died and those who recovered from the total number of cases, Belek notes that it is one of the most important indicators showing the course of the pandemic. As the number of patients recovered daily exceeds the number of newly identified patients, the active patient pool begins to shrink.
Reviewing the statistics, Belek states that on April 14, the number of patients recovered daily exceeded the number of new patients. Except for the June 12-17 period, the number of people who recovered was always more than the number of patients until August 4, parallel to the number of patients decreasing from 62,200 to 10,678.
“However, as of August 4, the trend has again reversed and the number of new patients has exceeded the number of patients recovered in the past 15 days, except for 2 days. Moreover, the difference between new patients and recovered patients have been getting bigger. The number of active patients as of August 4 has reached 13,154 as of August 19 by an increase of 23 percent. Considering that there are approximately 10 unknown patients for every known patient, it is clear that the number of active patients is over 140 thousand,” Belek adds.
