President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced an end to the requirement for wearing protective masks at indoor venues, ending the most enduring ban related to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, mask use will be in place in mass transit and hospitals, "until the number of daily cases drops below 1,000."
His statement followed a meeting of the Health Ministry's Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board. Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, who delayed the meeting from early April to Wednesday, had revised the date again to Tuesday "not to postpone good news further." Koca's meetings with the board, which were weekly in the early days of the pandemic, have been a staple of daily life for millions glued to their screens every week to hear the latest update on the situation regarding the pandemic and restrictions. Erdoğan, who hosted Koca and the board at the Presidential Complex, said they would not convene again "without an emergency."
The country had imposed the mandatory mask rule in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. After two years, it took the first step to loosen the mask mandate last month, limiting mask use only to indoor venues. The move had followed a considerable drop in the number of daily cases, thanks to mass vaccination and the prevalence of the omicron strain, less severe than earlier variants of the coronavirus.
The move follows similar actions by European countries, which lifted the mask mandate partially or entirely, and Erdoğan pointed out that those countries did so as the pandemic was "no longer a global threat."
"I believe we reached the same stage," he said. The mandatory mask use for people at the age of 65 and above and those with chronic illnesses, however, will remain in place, Erdoğan said, citing the recommendation of the Advisory Board.
It has been two years since Turkey 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 Monday, it was 2,604, far below the more than 100,000 just two months ago, while fatalities were only 15. With the onset of summer, experts predict the cases will further drop, as has been the case in the past two summers.
The sudden change in the situation is no miracle for Turkey, which strived to keep the cases at a minimum at the cost of damage to the economy and collective mental fatigue with bans constricting daily life.
To counter the spread of the virus, Turkey has administered over 147.4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses since it launched an immunization drive in January 2021. Over 57.8 million people have received the first dose, while more than 53 million are fully vaccinated. In December, the Health Ministry started offering the fifth booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines for a specific group of people. Individuals who received two doses of the Chinese Sinovac and two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at least three months ago are able to get an appointment for the fifth dose. They are able to receive the Sinovac, Pfizer-BioNTech or the domestically developed Turkovac vaccines as a booster.
The state of Turkish hospitals also appears to be a culmination of the successful fight against the pandemic. Once brimming with patients fighting for their lives and staff in full protective gear, coronavirus wards are mostly empty and intensive care units are hosting fewer coronavirus patients.
Erdoğan acknowledged that life in Turkey and the world was overshadowed by the pandemic that affected everything from education to production and consumption. "Every country tried to fight the pandemic with their own capacity and faced serious challenges. We even witnessed 'great' countries fighting each other at airports to secure mask supplies. This was a testing process for countries' administrations. Turkey has been one of the few countries which passed this test," he said.
The president congratulated the Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board for their "exemplary" work and commemorated doctors who succumbed to the coronavirus, from Cemil Taşçıoğlu and Feriha Öz to Murat Dilmener, whose names now adorn hospitals. "While other countries restricted access to health care, we provided more than 16,000 new beds to citizens, through city, public and emergency hospitals. We never allowed any shortcomings in addressing social needs and supported our nation through practices like Vefa social support groups," Erdoğan said.
