As Turkey yearns for a return to pre-pandemic days, the state of hospitals appears to be a harbinger of good times to come. Once brimming with patients fighting for their lives and staff in full protective gear, coronavirus wards are mostly empty and intensive care units are hosting fewer coronavirus patients.

It has been two years since Turkey faced the steep risk of the coronavirus, with the number of cases snowballing. The country was forced to build new hospitals in Istanbul exclusively to handle the mounting number of cases. For months, health care workers were forced to work long shifts, with no contact with their families.

Over the past few weeks, the number of cases has drastically dropped and as of Wednesday, it was 5,529, far below the more than 100,000 just two months ago. Mass vaccination and the prevalence of omicron, a less-severe strain of the coronavirus, are credited with decreasing the number of cases.

Professor Sema Kultufan Turan, a member of the Health Ministry’s Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board, said there were almost "no patients" in immediate need of hospitalization or intensive care. Turan, who also serves as administrator of emergency services at Ankara City Hospital in the Turkish capital, said the number of cases has seen a downward trend both in the world and in Turkey in the past two months.

"We have a dramatic drop in hospitalizations here in Ankara City Hospital. The rate of people in need of intensive care after COVID-19 infection decreased by 80%. This is good news. We know that this is not exclusive to our hospitals and is also the situation in other health facilities across Turkey. Certainly, we have positive cases, but they are mild and most are outpatients," she told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Thursday.

Turan said they reduced the capacity of intensive care units dedicated to COVID-19 patients in the past month and that the units were now treating patients suffering from other illnesses.

She associated this sudden drop with "efficient and full vaccination" and the omicron variant "sharing similar symptoms with the seasonal flu and being less severe." Turkey launched its vaccination program in January 2021 and since then, it has administered more than 147 million doses of vaccines. The number of people with two doses of vaccines has exceeded 53 million, while another 27.6 million people have been administered three doses of vaccines in total.

She said that the general expectation in the scientific community was that the coronavirus would prevail more but it would be "endemic" rather than pandemic. She added that the upcoming summer would further reduce the number of cases. Experts say rise in the number of coronavirus cases in autumn and winter is mainly associated with people spending more time indoors.

In Istanbul, Turkey’s most populated city, which was also the city with highest number of cases once, local health authorities hail the current state in the pandemic. The city now has only about 196 cases per every 100,000 people, according to the figures from the last week of March. Moreover, most cases are patients who recover after self-isolation.

Professor Kemal Memişoğlu, head of the Directorate of Health in the city, said the cases have reached the "lowest levels since the pandemic began." Memişoğlu told Demirören News Agency (DHA) on Thursday that he predicted the pandemic would be reduced to "a seasonal illness" within a few months.

Memişoğlu said that the number of positive cases was the highest in January, since the beginning of the pandemic in Turkey in March 2020 but what followed was not a mass hospitalization. "On the contrary, it was only one in six infected people who required hospitalization," he noted. Memişoğlu added that the figures were still decreasing.

He noted that the city had some 13,000 more hospital beds during the course of the pandemic, thanks to opening of nine new hospitals, and did not face any problems at the peak of the pandemic. However, he warned that the hospitals may now face a flood of appointments as most people shunned visits to hospitals for nonemergency cases.