STA, 4 July 2020 - Slovenia has recorded as many as 30 new coronavirus infections from 1,456 tests on Friday, a new high since mid-April, fresh government data show.
On the up side, only six Covid-19 patients remain in hospital, after four were discharged yesterday. None of them requires intensive treatment.
According to the national Covid-19 tracker site, Slovenia now has 160 active infections out of the total case count of 1,679. As many as 105,652 tests for Sars-CoV-2 have been performed so far.
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Bojana Beović, the head of the Covid-19 advisory group at the Health Ministry, said the latest numbers came as a negative surprise. She told Radio Slovenija they had expected about 20 new cases.
"This is a reflection of the situation about a fortnight ago and we hope the measures recently taken, such as border restrictions and return to mandatory face masks, will contribute to a better situation over the coming days," said the epidemiologist.
The dilemma faced by the group she heads and the government is whether to wait for the effects of the latest measures to show or take more drastic steps now.
Her concern is that the prescribed measures are being flouted: "There are continuous reports about inconsistent border checks, about life at bars," she said, warning that the riskiest industries could be forced back into lockdown if the infection curve kept increasing and safety measures were not heeded.
Most of the latest cases, 5, were confirmed in Ljubljana, which has now 30 active cases. Fourteen other municipalities had at least one new case, while three new infections were among foreign citizens.
More than half of the new cases, 18, are young, up to the age of 44, including a child, up to the age of four.
The UKC Ljubljana hospital said a member of the non-health staff at the Paediatric Clinic has fallen ill with Covid-19. The person stayed home as soon as noticing the symptoms, had not been directly involved in the handling of patients and had been wearing a surgical mask at work all the time.
Meanwhile, the number of infected staff at the emergency medical unit of the Maribor community health centre has increased to eleven, including eight doctors and three paramedics, assistant director there Aleksander Jus told reporters today.
He said no infections or symptoms had been detected in patients who had been in contact with the first responders or visited the unit at the UKC Maribor hospital emergency ward on the critical day. Nor have there been any infections among the relatives of the infected health workers.
One of the staff at UKC Maribor has been additionally positive from that cluster, presumably originating in an infection transmitted from abroad.
Data from the National Institute of Public Health published by the tracker site covid-19.sledilnik.org show that there have been a total of 190 coronavirus cases confirmed among Slovenian health workers.
There have been no fatalities for over a month now with the death toll at 111.
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