ANKARA, Feb 18 (NNN-ANADOLU) – Turkey will gradually lift restrictions against COVID-19 on the provincial levels from March, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said yesterday.
“We will start the normalisation process at the beginning of March by dividing our provinces into four groups,” Erdogan said.
The government will lift the restrictions gradually, according to the number of cases, vaccination and other relevant criteria in the provinces, he added.
But the number of daily cases should also be declining, in order to take a step towards lifting restrictions in these provinces, Erdogan noted.
Turkey yesterday reported 7,325 new cases, including 649 symptomatic patients, taking the total number of positive cases to 2,609,359.
The death toll rose by 86 to 27,738, while the total recoveries climbed to 2,496,833, after 7,209 more cases recovered in the last 24 hours.
The rate of pneumonia in COVID-19 patients stands at 3.6 percent and the number of seriously ill patients was 1,193, said the ministry.
A total of 117,121 tests were conducted over the past day, raising the overall number of tests in Turkey to 31,866,086.
Turkey started mass vaccination on Jan 14, after the authorities approved the emergency use of the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine. More than 4,873,000 people have been vaccinated so far.
