Turkey imposes strict Covid-19 curfew and new prevention measures

ANKARA – After yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that curfews would be imposed for entire weekends and partially on weekdays. The curfew will be between 21.00 and 05.00 on weekdays, and from 21.00 on Friday evenings to 05.00 on Monday morning. The new measures will be effective as of 21:00 on Tuesday, December 1.

Sectors excluded from the curfew are production, logistics, healthcare, agriculture, and forestry. Markets, grocery stores, butchers, greengrocers, and stores that provide home delivery will be excluded from the weekend curfew. Restaurants are only allowed to provide take away. Condolences, New Year celebration, and religious activities will not be held, and funeral prayers are only allowed to be performed with a maximum of 30 people. Elderly and young people below 20 years-old are not allowed to use public transport.

The stricter curfew and prevention measures are introduced to counter the surge in Covid-19 related registered deaths (185 on Sunday and more than 13 thousand in total) and new daily infections (more than 29 thousand) after Turkey changed its criticized methodology of registering new cases.

The Turkish health sector has a hard coping with the rise in new cases.