The Health Ministry scrapped yet another rule related to the COVID-19 pandemic on Friday at a time when daily case numbers are sinking to new lows. The ministry announced that patients will no longer be required to undergo polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing before any surgery or procedure in hospitals.
Hospitals are among the two remaining places where strict measures against COVID-19 remain, along with mass transit, namely the mask mandate that was lifted everywhere else. They also serve as the main venue for tests. Turkey has run millions of PCR tests since the pandemic made its foray into the country in 2020 and claimed more than 97,000 lives. Nowadays, the number of daily cases, along with the number of daily tests, has significantly decreased after a sharp surge a few months ago. On Thursday, for instance, Turkey conducted 101,263 tests and only 1,253 people tested positive. Eleven COVID-19 fatalities were registered the same day.
It is also the hospitals that reflect the reduced severity of the pandemic. Most hospitals in the country have shut down their COVID-19 wards and intensive care units are largely devoid of coronavirus patients. This new situation owes much to the country's mass vaccination campaign and the prevalence of omicron, a variant of the virus that does not cause hospitalizations as much as earlier strains, with most people able to recover after a brief period of self-isolation.
Experts say the last pandemic-related restrictions could be lifted in a few weeks since the government earlier announced that the mask mandate would no longer be applied in hospitals and mass transit if the number of daily cases drops below 1,000.
As life largely returns to pre-pandemic normal, authorities are also ending certain preemptive measures declared in the first year of the pandemic. The extended leave granted to convicts incarcerated at minimum security prisons is among them. Some 80,000 prisoners, who were already entitled to weekend leave at the low-security facilities, were released for an indefinite period in a bid to stop the cycle of infections. The Justice Ministry has announced that the leave will end on May 31. The ministry's directorate of prisons reminded the convicts to return before the deadline in a statement on Friday. Failure to return to said prisons, formally known as "open prisons" in Turkey, may result in the convict being declared a fugitive, which could result in an extension of their prison term or a transfer to a high-security facility that does not allow weekend leave.