Is Turkey toast?

For our first blog post, I’d like to address a curious situation that anyone following Pandemonitor might have noticed in the past few days – the astounding ascent of Turkey, from a cPDI of 50.4 (46th in the world) on Nov. 25th, to a score of 89 (and 1st place globally) on Dec. 1st, just six days later. To analyze what happened, I turned to Turkey’s page on the “single country” section of the dashboard, and realized immediately that the rise in cPDI is based on a sudden ‘jump’ in the incidence rate (weekly new cases per 100,000 people), which occurred on Nov 25th and caused the reproduction rate (R) to jump to levels that we haven’t seen since March (2.5 and up). Moreover, the test positivity rate jumped at the same point as well, hitting almost 20% by Dec. 3rd, and the mortality rate seemed off a well, reaching 3.6%.

Turkey’s stats from the 3rd of December 2020


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