An explosion at a COVID-19 unit in Turkey leaves nine dead

At least nine patients affected by COVID-19 died this Saturday and eleven were injured when an oxygen tube exploded in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital in Gaziantep province in southern Turkey.

The accident took place at 01:45 GMT in the morning, when a device supplying oxygen to one of the patients exploded, according to information provided by Gaziantep Governor's Office through an official statement. 

"Nine of the 19 patients hospitalized in the ICU have lost their lives. Eleven others have been transferred to other hospitals in the region," the official statement said. 

Fire and police detachments were sent to the scene to extinguish the fire caused by the explosion and move the patients to other buildings. Meanwhile, the authorities have launched a judicial and administrative investigation into the events. 

"The patients who died were between 64 and 85 years old. Eight died in the ICU and one during the transfer to the other hospital," Efe Okkes Ozeksi, editor of the local newspaper Gaziantep27, told the agency.

This terrible accident comes at a difficult time for Turkey because of the exponential increase in cases of coronavirus infection that has occurred in recent times due to the change in the way cases are registered by the Ottoman administration. 

When Turkey changed the way in which daily COVID-19 infections are reported, it confirmed what medical groups and opposition parties had long suspected: that the Eurasian country is facing a major surge in cases of infection that is calling into question the resilience of the health system, which is suffering a major collapse in the face of a lack of resources and a rise in the number of people affected. 

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided at the end of November to report all positive tests for coronavirus, not only the number of patients treated for symptoms, bringing the number of daily cases to more than 30,000. With the new data, the country went from being one of the least affected in Europe to one of the hardest hit by the health crisis. 

This came as no surprise to the Turkish Medical Association, which has been warning for months that previous figures from the Executive concealed the seriousness of the spread and that a lack of transparency was contributing to the further spread of the virus. The association claims, however, that the Ministry of Health's figures remain low compared to its estimate of at least 50,000 new infections per day due to the pandemic. 

Currently, Turkey has 1,982,090 diagnosed cases, 17,610 deaths from COVID-19 and 1,753,552 recovered from the disease.