Downgrading the severity of the disease still requires further verification but the latest figures show that the coronavirus is not as dangerous as it was for Turkey. Time will tell whether it has evolved into an endemic or whether it will become a seasonal illness like the flu; nonetheless, Turkey is considering taking more radical steps soon to ease its drastic measures against the disease.

Professor Aydın Yılmaz, a member of the Health Ministry's Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board that advises the government on the course to be taken in combatting the deadly infection, says the "heavy" phase of the pandemic is over. "We will see it more like an endemic, like influenza. We will have a better summer," Yılmaz says.

The term "pandemic" quickly replaced "endemic" in the Turkish vocabulary and around the world, becoming the most popular word in many languages in 2020, the year the coronavirus made waves across the globe. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 formally declared the chain of infections a pandemic, meaning a disease prevalent in an entire country, continent or the world. Now, "endemic" may be the word the Turkish public needs to describe a landscape in which the coronavirus is treated as something like the common flu, with similar symptoms and fewer, if any, lethal consequences.

Yılmaz, who also serves as chief physician of a training and research hospital in the capital Ankara, says his hospital has only four coronavirus patients in intensive care, and they were admitted a long time ago. "We have had no patients admitted to intensive care in the past 15 days," he told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday. This sentence means a lot to health care workers across Turkey who received a barrage of new patients almost daily in the early days of the pandemic. As a matter of fact, the pandemic climbed to its highest level in December and up until mid-winter, daily cases could fluctuate around 100,000. In addition, the hospital only has six coronavirus patients who do not require intensive care. Yılmaz says the situation is more or less the same in other hospitals across Turkey. He highlighted that mass vaccination was the most important factor at this stage of the pandemic and the high number of people who gained immunity after recovering from the coronavirus also played an important role. "We left behind the heavy pandemic phase. It will continue like endemic, we hope," he said.

On Sunday, Turkey reported 3,268 new cases, 17 fatalities and 14,952 recoveries. Speaking to reporters in the northwestern province of Bursa on Monday, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the pandemic was "dropping off the agenda of Turkey every day." "Yesterday was the lowest level in the pandemic in more than a year. It is also safe to say that fatalities are only among patients with chronic diseases. In more than 20 provinces, there are no COVID-19 patients in need of intensive care. We are entering a period that will proceed with individual measures rather than (government-imposed) restrictions," he said. "We are entering a period in which (COVID-19) resembles the flu more," he underlined.

Media outlets are speculating that Turkey plans to end the mask mandate, at least for schools, which switched to in-person education last year under the condition that all students and staff wear protective masks. The decision will be made at Wednesday's Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board meeting. Minister Koca said it will be "one of the most important meetings" of the board that was established before COVID-19 made its foray into Turkey in March 2020. A report in Sabah newspaper claims the indoor mask requirement will be entirely scrapped, except at hospitals and on mass transit, and that down the line, the government plans to end the one-week mandatory quarantine for coronavirus patients.