 from TotalAnalysis, a London-based independent pandemic research group.){kind=link}
Turkey, which has been criticized since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic for failing to report data transparently, is ranked 97th among 100 countries on the Covid Data Transparency Index (CDTI) from TotalAnalysis, a London-based independent pandemic research group.
Turkey fared better than only three countries — Turkmenistan, Serbia and North Korea — which are at the bottom of the list.
The report from the TotalAnalysis, which has been recording COVID-19 data from 200 countries since the beginning of the pandemic, examines how governments have managed their COVID data during the pandemic and how transparently and reliably they have presented this information.
At the top of the list are countries Belgium, Norway and the US, which all have a transparency score of 75 percent, while Turkey’s transparency score stands at 8 percent.
Turkey reported the first coronavirus case on March 11, relatively later than other countries in Europe. From July to the end of November, the Turkish government made public only the comparatively small number of COVID-19 “patients” with symptoms, excluding people with no symptoms and who didn’t require hospitalization. In the wake of growing criticism, the Health Ministry in late November began to report the number of all individuals who tested positive for the coronavirus.
The reporting of all coronavirus cases in Turkey, which numbered some 30,000 a day at the time, caused the country jump from one of the least-affected countries to the sixth most affected in the world back in December.
Turkey’s medical community and opposition parties are accusing the Turkish government of manipulating the number of the coronavirus cases and deaths in the country in order to mask the true scale of the pandemic and present a “success story” to the public.
On Jan. 5 Turkey reported 14,494 new coronavirus cases, while the death toll over the past 24 hours was 194. Turkey’s total coronavirus death toll stands at 21,879, and the country has so far reported a total of 2,270,101 cases.