LJUBLJANA, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- Slovenia on Wednesday registered a record daily number of 3,354 COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases to 131,787 in the country, according to the National Institute of Public Health.
On Tuesday, a combined total of 22,194 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and rapid antigen tests were performed in the country. Of the 6,956 PCR tests performed, 2,602 came back positive. That resulted in a positivity rate of 37.4 percent. The positivity rate for the 15,238 rapid antigen tests exceeded 4.9 percent. Thirty-one new deaths took the toll to 2,899.
The national COVID-19 tracker site Sledilnik shows that there are currently 21,781 active cases in Slovenia. A total of 1,177 patients are in hospital for COVID-19, 183 of them in intensive care.
Addressing a daily briefing, Nuska Caks Jager, deputy head of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ), suggested the rise in infections in recent days was mainly due to private gatherings and family reunions over the holidays.
The government's spokesman for the COVID-19 pandemic, Jelko Kacin, said that new measures or changes to the existing ones could be expected at the government session on Thursday.
Kacin said an analysis conducted by the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology of the Ljubljana Faculty of Medicine had not yet detected the presence of the mutated virus strain in Slovenia.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in some countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 235 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Jan. 6. Enditem
