The previous year’s death statistics are usually announced in June.

This year, the death statistics of 2020 were awaited with even more anticipation. The general opinion was that the COVID-19 deaths would reflect on the statistics and that it would be possible to see the Ministry of Health data, which was sometimes doubted. This would be true if the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced the death statistics in June. But it wasn’t because the data was not collected in time. Nearly three months passed and still, there is no sign of the death statistics. It’s still not clear when TurkStat will announce them.

TurkStat, which refrains from revealing death statistics, actually gave its first clue long ago. The first signal regarding the death statistics came when TurkStat announced the population statistics back in February. But since no one expected a delay in the announcement of death statistics back then, no one paid too much attention to that data. The GDP data that was announced last week once again showed the abnormal change in the population.

So this means TurkStat hit itself all on its own! The rise in population hit its record-low last year. There isn’t a dramatic decrease in the number of births, so this means the number of deaths is above usual. This is what

TurkStat has a hard time explaining…

THE RECORD-LOW

Two population data are released for each year, one showing the middle of the year and the other showing the end of the year. TurkStat announced the results of the address-based population registration system of 2020 and the year-end population data of 2020 on February 4.

The mid-year population of 2020 increased by only 0.98% compared to 2019. This is a record-low in the history of the Republic. Since 1927, the population growth rate had never fallen below 1%. Previously, the lowest growth was recorded in the 1940-1945 period, which coincided with the Second World War, at 1.06%.

YEAR-END RATE WILL BE MUCH LOWER

The population growth, which stood at 0.98% in mid-year in 2020, is 0.55% by year-end, which indicates that the population growth rate gradually slowed down towards the end of the year. This picture says a lot… How did the increase in the population between the end of the year and the middle of the year, which was 576,000 in 2019, decreased to 229,000 in 2020?

Of course, the fact that the death toll is very high. If the deceased is buried the next day, immediately excluded from the population and the causes of death recorded except for some cases, how can we interpret the fact that these statistics have not been compiled in eight months?

Or maybe we need to ask this:

“How will we be convinced of the reliability of the data of an institution that has such a hard time putting together such a well-rec orded set of statistics through extensive fieldwork that it discloses at frequent intervals?”