STA, 27 November 2020 - Slovenia logged 1,609 new coronavirus cases for Thursday and 48 more fatalities as the number of Covid-19 patients requiring hospital treatment reached a new high.
Government data show the latest cases come from 6,587 tests, meaning the positivity rate was 24.4%, up slightly from 23.9% the day before when 1,767 came back positive, but down from over 27% a week ago.
Hospitalisations have risen by 22 to 1,324, while the number of patients in intensive care units dropped by nine to 206. On another positive note, 98 patients were discharged home yesterday.
With 48 more patients having died, the country's death toll among patients with Covid-19 rose to 1,293.
Jelko Kacin, the government Covid-19 spokesman, said 37 patients died at hospitals, ten at care homes and one in a facility for people with special needs.
He said 126 residents and 41 staff at care homes newly recovered from Covid-19, while 143 residents and 57 staff tested positive anew, as did eight special needs persons and one employee at the five special social care institutions.
Infections are reported from care homes across the country, including the coastal region, the least affected of all of Slovenia's regions.
The regional civil protection chief Rok Kamenšek reported that the Izola care home had 47 infections as of Thursday, including 12 among staff, and the one in Lucija had 68, including 23 staff.
The coastal region had 466 actively infected cases as of Wednesday, 216 of them in the Koper municipality.
However, the biggest daily increases in infections were in care homes in Krško, Brežice, Maribor and Ljubljana, of between 14 and 11, Kacin said.
Krško, the municipality in the east with a population of over 26,000, recorded as many as 59 new infections, which compares to 141 in the capital Ljubljana (over 295,000) and 81 in Maribor (almost 113,000).
The country has so far confirmed 72,682 coronavirus cases, with 20,268 cases still active. The rolling 14-day average is at 967, according to the tracker site covid-19.sledilnik.org.
The regions with the highest infection rates are Pomurje in the north-east and Koroška in the north, with 1,576 and 1,538 infections, respectively, per 100,000 residents.
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