by P.T., STA
Slovenia’s daily coronavirus case count dropped to 1,546 on Thursday from over 2,000 recorded on the previous two days, as the test positivity rate dropped slightly, fresh data from the government show. With another 31 fatalities, the Covid-19 death toll rose to 995.
A total of 5,673 tests for Sars-CoV-2 were performed yesterday, which means 27.25% of the tests came back positive, three percentage points down from the day before.
The number of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 rose by 16 to 1,254 but the number of those requiring intensive care dropped by four to 201, as 68 patients were discharged home yesterday.
Offering some more detailed statistics at the daily press briefing in the morning, government spokesman Jelko Kacin expressed concern about an increase in infections in care homes.
The number of infected residents increased by 250 to what are currently 2,510 actively infected residents out of a total of 4,424 infections among the residents in aged care facilities in the second wave.
The number of infected care home staff rose by 81 in the past day to 905 actively infected, out of a total of 1,656 confirmed infections among care home staff in the second wave.
Data from tracker site covid-19.sledilnik.org show Slovenia has so far confirmed 62,580 coronavirus infections with the number of active infections dropping by 0.1% in the past day to 19,894. The rolling 14-day average per 100,000 residents dropped to 949.
Robert Carotta, the coordinator for Covid-19 hospital beds at the Health Ministry who also addressed the briefing, assessed that the coronavirus situation was stabilising although it remained tense.
“Luckily, the number of hospitalisations isn’t increasing any more. It appears we’ve have reached a peak,” he said, but warned that the health system was stretched to the limit.
He said though that there was a decreasing number of patient transfers between hospitals, which “indicates the hospitals are able to attend to patients in their area”.
He also said that the number of infections among health staff was on the decrease; at Jesenice general hospital where he comes from, 37 staff are absent due to Covid-19, which was down from the peak of 72 or more than 20% of the staff at the hospital.