Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa on Tuesday announced the possibility of stricter COVID-19 measures, saying the situation was "no longer funny."

He held a press conference at which he presented the current epidemiological situation and the government’s action plan for this and the next stages of the epidemic.

Jansa said Slovenia was in the middle of the second wave and announced measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus with as few restrictions as possible.

“In dealing with this crisis, the government has almost exhausted the list of measures which haven’t restricted public life too much,” he said, adding that the government “will have to undertake stricter measures if the number of infections keeps increasing like this.”

“This is a call to get serious and sober up because this is no longer funny. As a society, we are facing the test of whether to restrict the worrisome infection trends with softer measures, as we hope, or if we will have to resort to stricter ones.”

Over the past 24 hours, 189 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the country, after 2,509 tests, and three patients have died.

The number of active cases is 2,206, with 111 patients hospitalised, including 20 in intensive care. Hospitals could soon be overwhelmed and unable to take in new patients.

Over the past 14 days, the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants has been 106 and the virus reproduction rate 1.3, all of which puts Slovenia in the orange zone and somewhere in the middle of the EU chart, Jansa and the government’s COVID spokesman Jelko Kacin said, adding that the situation in the EU was also deteriorating.