This week Turkey has seen a sharp increase in the number of coronavirus cases. It wasn't until the beginning of April however that any figures were actually released. Deniz, a Turkey citizen, speaks about why this strategy was taken.
<< The reason is that people would start panicking and try to move away from the cities and take the contagion with them, which is what they think happened in Italy when the northerners moved south, taking the virus with them. They've now released those figures, not street by street but you have an idea of which municipality is what. They did it after they banned movement between the cities, so they managed to get a ban on, stopped movement and then released figures on what was happening where. I think it was actually to try and contain any kind of panicked moving around. Turkey's an emerging market - people who are in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, they're actually from the heartland. So, it will be people from the south east, from the middle of Anatolia, and they are here for work so if they felt there wasn't work, they might just sort of move in great numbers back, and those areas may not be well-serviced in terms of hospitals and healthcare, whereas Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, the big cities do have big hospitals with good levels of healthcare, so better that they stay here. >>
Regardless, Turkey is now up to 38,000 cases nationwide and has seen a sharp increase over the course of the past week.