Recently Turkey is facing a very difficult second corona wave, with new death records on a daily basis. And today (Saturday), in one of the hospitals that treat the many patients in the city of Gaziantep in the south of the country, at least nine people actually died not from the virus – but from an explosion of an oxygen tank.
Immediately after the blast, which occurred at 4:45 a.m. local time, Sanco University Hospital had to find a solution for 14 inpatients in the Corona Intensive Care Unit – and they transferred them to hospitals in the area. “We have already performed tests at the hospital and received information from the authorities about the incident,” said Turkish Health Minister Dr. Fahrtin Koja, who was quick to visit Gaziantep.
Koja, as part of a policy led for a long time by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, has for many months published corona figures that include only corona patients and the dead – without a-symptomatic calculation. And only recently, after Ankara was severely criticized by the World Health Organization, did they start publishing the data properly – and the picture is worrying.
About three-quarters of the intensive care units across the country are full of Corona patients, after the state decided to take a weekend closure in recent weeks. Next week, for the first time in the second wave, the state will take a five-day consecutive closure. This, after 26,410 new infections were diagnosed yesterday, and a new daily record of deaths was recorded from the virus – 246. Tonight, more than 22,000 positives were registered in the country, thus Turkey crossing the 2 million infected threshold.