UPDATE - Turkey administers over 1.5M vaccine shots in past day

UPDATES WITH HEALTH MINISTER'S TWEET, CHANGES HEADLINE, LEDE

By Sena Guler

ANKARA (AA) – Turkey administered over 1.5 million shots of COVID-19 vaccines over the past day, according to the Turkish health minister Thursday.

Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter that the 1.5 millionth vaccine shot was given more than two hours before a 24-hour cycle was completed.

Over 38.85 million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered in Turkey since it launched a mass vaccination campaign in mid-January.

More than 24.7 million people have received their first doses, while over 14.15 million have been fully vaccinated, showed the Health Ministry count.

It also confirmed 5,904 new coronavirus cases, including 509 symptomatic patients, across the country in the last 24 hours. The number of new cases was 6,221 on Wednesday.

Turkey's overall case tally is now over 5.35 million, while the nationwide death toll has reached 49,012 with 62 new fatalities.

As many as 4,143 more patients won the battle against the virus, raising the total number of recoveries past 5.21 million.

Over 57.89 million coronavirus tests have been done to date.

The latest figures put the number of COVID-19 patients in critical condition at 860.

"Best [vaccination] performance yesterday [Wednesday] is Turkey's. Yesterday, we reached the highest number of vaccinations in the world according to the number of daily vaccinations per 1 million people," Koca earlier said on Twitter, referring to 1.41 million vaccine shots given on Wednesday.

- Provincial statistics

Koca also released the latest weekly infection rates across the country’s various regions.

Sharing the data for June 5-11 on Twitter, Koca said the case numbers are consistently falling.

The number of cases per 100,000 people was 55 in the metropolis of Istanbul – home to nearly one-fifth of Turkey’s population – and also 94 in the capital Ankara and 32 in Izmir on the Aegean.

The southern provinces of Hatay, Osmaniye and Adana had the lowest COVID-19 infections per 100,000 people.

To fight the spread of the virus, Turkey currently has a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. on Monday to Saturday and a full lockdown on Sundays.

Since December 2019, the pandemic has claimed over 3.83 million lives in 192 countries and regions, with more than 177.17 million cases reported worldwide, according to the US-based Johns Hopkins University.