İstanbul Municipality spokesperson Murat Ongun has announced that the use of public transportation on Sundays has seen a decline of nearly 92 percent since the beginning of March, the Diken news website reported on Monday.
Ongun tweeted a chart showing the number of people using public transport on March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 and April 5.
While the number was above 4,000,000 on March 1 and 8, which predated the first officially confirmed case of COVID-19 in Turkey on March 11, it dropped to 2,522,565 on March 15; 816,270 on March 22; 464,102 on March 29; and 382,492 on April 5.
Ongun said the fact that İstanbul has been the hardest hit Turkish city, that people started to follow calls to stay home more rigorously and the curfew imposed on people below the age of 20 have all contributed to the drop.
As of April 5 Turkey officially reported 27,069 cases of COVID-19 with a death toll of 574.
First seen in the Chinese city of Wuhan, COVID-19 has spread rapidly around the world, infecting over 1,300,000 people worldwide and killing more than 70,000. Some 275,000 people have recovered, according to Worldometers.info.
