The number of Croatian teachers infected with the coronavirus increased by 20 percent in the ten-day period when there were no classes due to holidays. and the effects of distance learning can be expected to become visible only in a few weeks' time, state agency Hina said on Monday, citing Education Minister Radovan Fuchs.

Neither Hina nor Fuchs said how many teachers that is, nor offered any explanation for the rise in cases.

Responding to questions from the press in Rijeka on Monday, Fuchs said that the exact number of infected pupils after the autumn break and two days of distance learning was not known yet, “but there has certainly been an increase there too.” Hina did not say why Fuchs was in Rijeka on Monday.

“We in the ministry are following data on infected children, and only verified PCR tests are taken for the official count. According to those records, 50,000 children have been infected since the start of the pandemic. We can speculate that, together with those who are asymptomatic and with the antigen tests, which is not recorded officially, about 100,000 children have been infected to date,” Fuchs speculated.

The new school year 2021-22 began on 6 September with nearly 460,000 elementary and secondary school students returning to school for in-person classes, including about 37,000 first graders. Asked what would happen to school employees who refuse to get vaccinated, and if they would be penalised, Fuchs avoided answering the question and simply said “We’ll see.”

“We are already seeing the mobilization of Facebook groups which are protesting (against mandatory vaccination) and yelling with an approach that a normal person would find difficult to understand. This (vaccination drive) is not just someone’s whim. The number of deaths every day evidently isn’t enough for them, so (they are like) ‘Let’s make this problem as big as possible and make it absurd’ in the name of (what is supposed to be) some sort of democracy,” Fuchs said.

“Nobody in their right mind is even thinking about introducing measures just because they like doing it,” Fuchs said, adding that “I myself can’t fully explain why we are so resistant to understanding the need for vaccination. We seem to belong to a group of countries with a lower trust of experts.”

“A model for testing teachers to coronavirus will be defined in the days ahead,” Hina said.