Over the past 24 hours, Slovenia has confirmed 1,037 cases of coronavirus and 9 deaths, Croatian state agency Hina said on Tuesday. The numbers of new cases is lower than had been projected, although the higher number of deaths is concerning, the country's health experts said on Tuesday.

Compared to seven days ago, when 1,308 new cases were reported, the situation is better, as the number of new cases is about 20 percent down. The entire last week health authorities reported lower numbers compared to the earlier period, when experts had estimated that there could be as many as 2,000 new cases per day by the end of September.

On the other hand, epidemiologists said that the situation continues to be very serious, which can be seen in the high incidence rate, with Slovenia marked dark red on the ECDC’s latest Covid map of Europe.

Last week about 50 people died from Covid and the number of hospitalized patients is continuing to rise. Hospital staff are being re-assigned to take care of Covid patients, and the lack of capacity is causing waiting lists for surgeries to lengthen.

The percentage of positive cases among those tested continues to be very high and was 21.7 percent in the past 24 hours. There are currently 419 hospitalized Covid patients in the country, including 105 on ventilators. The seven-day average of confirmed cases is currently 839, while the 14-day incidence rate is 619 per 100,000 people. There are currently 13,124 active cases in the country, Slovenia’s health ministry said.

About 53 percent of Slovenia’s 2.1 million population has received at least one vaccination shot, and 47 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated to date.