Krajci: New Variant of Coronavirus Confirmed in Bratislava, Too

Bratislava, January 9 (TASR) – The presence of “British” COVID-19 variant has already been confirmed in Bratislava capital city, Health Minister Marek Krajci (OLaNO) declared on Saturday.

Krajci thus expects that the new variant has already been distributed to every region of Slovakia and thus isolating individual regions at this stage would be pointless.

Hospitals will face challenging times over the course of next weeks and Krajci already informed Prime Minister Igor Matovic (OLaNO) about this development. Matovic in turn announced that he will convene an extraordinary session of the Government over the weekend.

The occurrence of the new coronavirus variant was confirmed from extracted samples a few days ago in the districts of Michalovce, Nitra and, now, Bratislava.

“We will need to continue curbing the inter-regional mobility in order to prevent its [new variant’s] quicker spread from more affected regions to the less critical ones and thus buy some time. It’s certain that we will need to implement long-term strict restrictions to prevent the socialisation of people, if we wish to slow down the local spreading of the virus.

However, all these standard measures fall short in the fight against such an aggressively contagious virus, which is why frequent testing of the population will be necessary,” announced Krajci.