Istanbul mayor faces Erdogan over coronavirus figures

What is the real impact the coronavirus is having on Turkey? This is a question that has long been flying around the agenda of epidemiologists and political analysts. Doubts about the veracity of the figures presented by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government were first raised by Turkish health care workers themselves. Voices critical of the Ankara administration claimed that the actual number of infections in the country was much higher than officially reported.

The latest to sound the alarm was Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and perhaps the most charismatic face of the opposition to the president's Justice and Development Party (AKP). His statement is nothing new: the town councils controlled by the opposition party - the Social Democratic People's Republican Party (CHP) - have repeatedly accused the central government of hindering the health and economic management of the crisis.

The official version, which is broadcast daily by Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, states that Turkey is right at the peak of the pandemic. The total number of deaths is 3081, while the total number of infected people is close to 120,000, with almost 3,000 new cases in the past day. This would make the Eurasian country one of the most affected by the spread of the pathogen worldwide, and would place it at the head of the entire Middle East region. However, its mortality rate would remain surprisingly low, at just over 2.6%.

But how credible are the data provided by the government, and is Erdogan deliberately disguising the figures and, with them, his management of the crisis? Mayor Imamoglu thinks so, as do media such as The New York Times, which, in a recent analysis signed by Carlotta Gall, predicted a much greater "calamity" in the country. 

Of course, the communication system set up by the Turkish Government has not been characterised by transparency. Official data are only provided for the national total, and not by region or city, which has given a general feeling of opacity.

"Whether it is about diagnoses, the amount of treatment or other problems, all information is under the control of the Ministry of Health in Ankara. And that only gives figures for the whole of Turkey," lamented Imamoglu in an interview with the German daily Die Zeit earlier this week. This makes it impossible for the lower levels of the administration to compile their own records and provide more detailed information to work with at ground level.

In these circumstances, it is not possible to compare data, since only the offical ones exist. The correspondent of the newspaper El País, Andrés Mourenza, however, gives us a chance to compare the numbers: he points out in a recent study that the burial figures provided by twelve of the main municipalities can help to shed a little more light on the matter.

According to these records, most of the large municipalities have recorded an abnormal increase in burials in recent weeks, which would most likely correspond to the deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The totals, according to the quantitative analysis carried out by Mourenza, would reflect substantially higher data on deaths than officially reported.

His estimate places the total number of deaths somewhere between 3500 and 5000. Speaking in terms of proportion, the difference between the actual and the official number could be as much as two thirds. If the worst estimates were true, the death rate of the virus in Turkey would be between 4 and 4.5%, a percentage similar to that shown by countries such as Germany and Denmark.

So, while it cannot be ruled out that the discrepancies are due to counting errors, it seems that the criticisms made by Imamoglu and other unofficial voices are by no means unfounded. Since the beginning of the crisis, accusations have been constantly exchanged between public figures. Indeed, political polarisation in Turkey has been exposed by the coronavirus crisis. 

The government's pressure on the municipalities has been reflected, for example, in situations that are counterproductive for the health system. For example, at the end of March, Erdogan denied the town councils of Istanbul and Ankara, also controlled by the Socialists, the possibility of organising their own collections. 

Moreover, the arrival of the pandemic has enabled Erdogan to further strengthen his apparatus of repression against voices critical of his administration. Under the pretext of silencing those who distribute false information about the pandemic, Ankara has begun to consider the use of applications such as WhatsApp or TikTok as terrorists, according to the Swedish information portal Nordic Monitor. Hundreds of people, including social network users and journalists, have already been investigated and arrested since COVID-19 began to spread in Turkey.