Turkey will lift weekend lockdowns in low and medium-risk cities and limit the restrictions to just Sundays in high and very high-risk cities as it starts a "controlled normalisation" of coronavirus measures, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday.
Turkey's biggest city, Istanbul, was categorised as high risk, while the capital Ankara was in the medium-risk category.
Erdoğan said the list of measures would be updated every two weeks on a province-by-province basis.
Most Turkish restaurants can now begin operating at up to 50 percent capacity from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm.
"Restaurants and cafés will operate with half capacity in cities excluding very high-risk regions," he said in a statement while announcing the restricted normalization process.
Turkey's reopening comes after more than nine million people received at least one dose of the CoronaVac jab acquired from the Chinese company Sinovac.
The Turkish president pointed out that Turkey has vaccinated over 10 percent of its total population so far.
Nearly two million Turks have received the full two doses since the campaign was launched in mid-January.
Preschools and elementary schools are to reopen across the country. All older students will also return to high schools in low and medium-risk regions, which include the capital Ankara.
"All pre-school education institutions across Turkey, elementary schools, grades 8 through 12 will resume in-person classes," Erdoğan added.
The weekend-long lockdown for Istanbul's 15.5 million residents will be applied to Sunday only. It will be lifted completely for low-risk regions in the southeast.
As of Monday, Turkey registered a total of 28.638 deaths from COVID-19, while over 2.57 million people have recovered from the disease. There have been over 2.7 million confirmed cases in the country.
Since December 2019, the pandemic has claimed more than 2.53 million lives in 192 countries and regions.
Over 114.2 million cases have been reported worldwide, with recoveries now over 64.51 million, according to figures compiled by the US' Johns Hopkins University.
The US, India, and Brazil remain the worst-hit countries in terms of cases.
