The head of Zagreb's Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Alemka Mrkotic, said on Sunday that getting children back to school at the start of the new school year this September would pose no heightened health risk.

Markotic told the state television HRT that the examples of the countries that kept schools open also during the peak of the epidemic of coronavirus proved that.

She said that pupils with respiratory infections should be kept at home.

As for the current Covid-19 infection numbers, the epidemiologist admitted that those figures would be considered a serious issue if they had appeared in winter.

Furthermore, 90% of those who have now caught the virus do not need hospital treatment and a mere 1% of these cases are on ventilators, Markotic said calling for taking the whole situation into consideration rather than focusing only on the new cases’ statistics.