Turkey will build two hospitals in the country’s largest city of İstanbul for COVID-19 patients, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said late on Monday, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The hospitals will be constructed in the Atatürk Airport area on the European side of the city and the Sancaktepe district on the Asian side, the president said in a televised speech in Ankara.
“Their construction will be completed within 45 days,” Erdoğan said, adding that each will have a 1,000-bed capacity.
The president pointed out that Turkey’s health system had surpassed an important threshold by conducting 20,000 COVID-19 tests a day.
The Turkish Health Ministry announced that a total of 21,400 tests were conducted in a single day across the country on Monday and that 3,148 people tested positive for the virus, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 30,217.
Turkey has recorded a total of 649 deaths as 75 more people died over the past 24 hours.
Erdoğan on April 3 announced a series of strong measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak in the country, declaring a partial curfew for people under the age of 20 and closing the borders of 31 out of 81 provinces across the country.
Additionally, wearing face masks is now mandatory in crowded areas, including supermarkets, marketplaces and workplaces.
In his Monday’s speech Erdoğan noted that local officials began distributing medical masks to people free of charge, adding that their sale in the marketplace was banned.