Many of Turkey’s doctors and health care workers left their shifts at noon on April 17 to stand together — albeit a meter apart, as necessitated by the rules of social distancing — in recognition of the approximately 100,000 doctors verbally and physically assaulted while doing their job in the last 10 years.

Organized by the vocal — and anti-governmental — Turkish Medical Association (TTB), the demonstration comes in the wake of a new law that slaps heavy penalties on those who assault health care workers. Taken amidst the fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic that claims more than a hundred lives every day in Turkey, the law will punish physical attacks on health care workers with 1.5 to 4.5 years in prison without parole. Threats or insults against health care officials carry a maximum punishment of three years.

April 17 marks the death of a young doctor, Ersin Arslan, who was stabbed to death in the southeastern city of Gaziantep in 2012 by the 17-year-old grandson of an 80-year-old patient who died at the hospital. Arslan was hardly an isolated case. A report prepared by the main opposition Republican People’s Party last December says that a Health Ministry hotline to report physical and verbal violence against health professionals received at least 40 complaints daily between 2012 and 2019. The report read that nine doctors had been killed on duty between 2005 and 2019.

The recent law covers doctors and other health care professionals including pharmacists, who for the last two weeks have faced threats and attacks from people angered by the unavailability of protective masks. “Some people have attacked the pharmacists to take the mask off their faces,” Erdogan Colak, the chairman of the pharmacists union, complained to the local media.