Turkey’s Covid Wordplay Masks Extent of Outbreak, Lawmaker Says

(Bloomberg) -- A lawmaker from Turkey’s main opposition party said the official count of coronavirus cases in the country doesn’t reflect the extent of the outbreak, citing a page of data collected from test centers nationwide.

The document, which was passed to Murat Emir of the Republican People’s Party and has been seen by Bloomberg, details new infections for Sept. 10. According to the data, there were 29,377 Covid-19 cases recorded that day, far more than the Health Ministry’s “daily patient” count of 1,512. About 158,000 tests were carried out, the document shows.

In late July, the ministry changed the wording in its Covid updates to report “patient” numbers, instead of new “cases” it had previously announced.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the current stage of the pandemic justifies shifting the emphasis from the number of positive cases to patients. Koca dismissed Emir’s accusation of misreporting, but acknowledged that the group classified as patients doesn’t include asymptomatic carriers of the virus.

The language change took place July 29, when the ministry began announcing the number of patients instead of new cases. Despite the change in what’s being counted, there wasn’t a discontinuity in the series. On July 29, Turkey reported 942 daily “patients,” down from the 963 “cases” it had announced a day earlier.

“The comparison is a stark display of why the ministry made the shift in July,” Emir said of the reporting change. “The positive case figure has surged so much that they’ve concocted this thing called ‘number of patients.”

Emir said the document was based on test data from 270 centers across Turkey, and showed more than 3,000 new cases in Istanbul alone on Sept. 10, double the figure reported for the entire country.

Official data shows 318,663 people in Turkey have been identified as coronavirus “patients”since the outbreak began, with 8,195 deaths. An association of Turkish doctors said in April that official figures were failing to track the spread of the disease.

Turkey’s economy fared better than analysts forecast as the government contained damage from the pandemic with a campaign of stimulus that came at the cost of destabilizing the lira. Gross domestic product last quarter shrank 9.9% from a year earlier, the most in over a decade, but that compared with expectations of a 10.7% contraction in a Bloomberg survey.

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