Topic:
Country: Turkey
Delegate Name: Rocco Morrow
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world hard, and caught many off guard. With this horrible sickness landing, and many people scared, pandemic preparedness was on everybody’s mind. In December of 2019, the first reported case of COVID-19 was reported. A year later, the first official COVID-19 vaccine was produced. As fast as this was, the speed was mainly due to the vaccine being built upon pre-existing scientific research. Looking to the future, pandemic preparedness needs to be made a priority. With all the pain and devastation that the COVID-19 pandemic caused, we must look to measures of pandemic prevention that were taken in the past in order to fine tune those measures in the future.
The first reported COVID-19 case in Turkey was on March 10, 2020. After this, COVID-19 cases in Turkey skyrocketed. Turkey quickly became one of the top 10 countries with the highest number of COVID-19 cases globally. According to the Nation Library of Medicine, “Daily death numbers ranged between 1 and 126, with a total number of 3174 deaths, on April 30, 2020. The case-fatality rate showed a steady increase, ranging between 1.02% and 2.43%, yet, have been relatively low compared with that in other countries with similarly high case numbers”. With this in mind, Turkey urges all countries to think about improving global coordination. Turkey believes that if all countries tackle a pandemic head-on, proper prevention and preparedness protocols could be put into place, and would grant every country a better chance at combating future pandemics.
