Photo used for illustrative purpose.

The Turkish Health Ministry has announced that the country will not require a negative Covid-19 PCR test result for passengers from 16 countries starting from May 15 onwards.

The nations are China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, Latvia, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Thailand, South Korea, Israel, Japan and Estonia, Xinhua news agency quoted the Ministry as saying on Sunday.

Turkey on Sunday reported 25,980 new coronavirus cases, including 2,587 symptomatic patients, raising the total number in the country to 4,875,388, according to the Ministry.

The death toll from the virus rose by 340 to 40,844, while the total recoveries climbed to 4,480,381 after 75,182 more recovered in the last 24 hours.

Photo used for illustrative purpose.

The rate of pneumonia in Covid-19 patients stands at 2.4 percent and the number of seriously ill patients is 3,532 in the country, said the Ministry.

A total of 240,145 tests were conducted over the past day, taking the overall number of tests in Turkey to 47,744,338.

Turkey started mass COVID-19 vaccination on January 14.

More than 13,815,000 people have been vaccinated so far.

Turkey reported its first Covid-19 case on March 11, 2020.

IANS