‘Turkish public must implement measures against COVID-19’

The implementation of the measures taken by the government and health institutions and by individuals will determine the speed of the spread of the coronavirus in the country, according to a member of the Turkish Health Ministry's Coronavirus Science Committee. Warning against careless behavior, Professor Alpay Azap, from Ankara University's Medicine Faculty, said, "the public must abide by the rules."
Tell us which stage we are in terms of the coronavirus pandemic.
We have entered a stage in which the virus is in local circulation. We have started to detect COVID-19 cases in citizens without any first- or second-hand contact with [people that were] abroad. The number of cases are on the rise, and this is a situation we have been expecting. One hundred cases is a critical threshold since afterward, there is a very speedy upward trend in cases. That means the virus has started to spread from several different points. We are currently in the period of rapid rise.
Currently, Italy is being taken as a benchmark. When do we expect the cases to peak in Turkey?
Will we be like Italy or France - or neither? We will be like Turkey. Each country has different social, economic and medical dynamics. I don't think country comparisons are always effective. Currently, we seem to be ahead of Italy [in terms of the speed of the contamination] since we reached 100 cases on the seventh day. But the first case we officially detected might not be the very first case we found. Maybe there were other earlier undetected cases. But obviously, we have the experience derived from what other countries have done and based on that, we will probably see the peak by mid-April … and then a plateau in the following one or two weeks, followed by a...