Health authorities and experts in Slovakia are sounding the alarm that the B.1.1.7 mutation of the coronavirus, first detected in the United Kingdom, is spreading dramatically.
Conservative populist government leader Igor Matovic reported on Facebook today that the mutation accounted for about 71 percent of all positive test results Wednesday. Regionally, higher levels were also reported.
The university hospital in the second-largest city of Kosice in eastern Slovakia announced today that the proportion of the mutation in its most recently tested samples had already risen to more than 90 percent of positive test results.
Proportion “higher than in the UK”
“It seems that the proportion in Slovakia is higher than in the rest of the European Union and also higher than in Great Britain,” Pavol Jarcuska, the executive director of the Clinic of Infectious Diseases and Travel Medicine, which is part of the University of Kosice, told the TASR news agency.
Because of the heightened pandemic situation, several cities and regional governments canceled their planned partial school openings. According to original plans of the Ministry of Education in Bratislava, at least pupils up to ten years old were to be allowed to return to school from Monday. Meanwhile, many regional authorities declared themselves unable to secure in time all the coronavirus tests required for the opening.
— source: orf.at/picture: pixabay.com
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