Social distancing measures not enforced in workplaces all over Turkey

With more than 86,000 infections recorded as of Sunday, Turkey has the highest total of coronavirus infections in Asia and the seventh highest in the world. Yet thousands are still breaching the government’s measures to halt the spread of the COVID-19, with many of the infringements by companies that have pressed on with economic activity despite the risks.

In a showcase of its zero-tolerance policy to breaches of the weekend lockdown imposed on Turkey’s largest cities, the Interior Ministry said on Monday that it had launched legal proceedings for more than 20,000 people accused of breaking curfew.

The government has refrained from calling a comprehensive lockdown, instead gradually imposing tighter restrictions that are regulating public areas to reduce the volume of traffic and keeping people under 20 and over 65 years old at home.

Meanwhile, businesses that stay open during the pandemic must ensure that the number of customers on their premises is 10 percent of capacity and all wear protective masks.

But multiple reports of risky breaches of the government’s social distancing guidelines in other workplaces have highlighted a double standard in the measures.

Thousands of miners in Turkey’s northern Samsun and western Manisa provinces returned to work in the type of enclosed and poorly ventilated conditions that carry the highest risk of spreading the infection through airborne droplets.

Five thousand employees, including some who had tested positive for COVID-19, were sent back to work by İmbat Mining in Soma, Manisa province, left-wing Sol newspaper quoted miners’ union chairman Tahir Çetin as saying.

More miners carried on working in Samsun’s Şahin mountains, where the TÜPRAG metal mining company has many sites, Birgün said.

Samsun Environmental Platform spokesman Mehmet Özdağ called for solidarity with the employees in a statement demanding that the company allow its employees to wait out the coronavirus at home.

Even work conditions on temporary hospitals that are being built to combat the pandemic have failed to meet the government’s own guidelines. Evrensel newspaper shared video footage of construction workers, many of them without masks, eating together in a crowded canteen at the site of a 1,000-bed field hospital under construction near the shuttered Atatürk Airport in Istanbul.

Atatürk Havalimanı yanındaki hastane şantiyesinden gelen görüntüler koronavirüs önlemlerinin yetersizliğini gösteriyor https://t.co/zpstgKNvtB pic.twitter.com/VYwRWSV1EE

— Evrensel Gazetesi (@evrenselgzt) April 19, 2020

Meanwhile, people have complained about the medical-grade masks received from pharmacies, tasked with distributing them by the government, questioning the quality and cleanliness of the products, BBC News Türkçe said.

Eczanelerden maske dağıtımında dile getirilen sorunlar:

• "Her maskenin kalitesi birbirinden farklı, üreticisi belli değil"
• "Bazı maskeler kirli, kalitesiz ve ambalajsız"
• "SMS gelmediği için maskeye ulaşamayan birçok kişi var"https://t.co/7Ej9RNav8a

— BBC News Türkçe (@bbcturkce) April 19, 2020