A Slovenian doctor employed at the Maribor Clinical Centre has again become infected with coronavirus after he previously received two doses of the vaccine, sources at the second-biggest hospital in the country confirmed on Wednesday.

The local POP-TV broadcaster said reinfection was possible as none of the vaccines was 100% efficient.

The doctor recently returned from Africa and it is assumed that he could have become infected with the more contagious, South African variant, which is yet to be determined.

Microbiologists will need at least a week for virus genome sequencing and to confirm the variant, medical official Tjasa Zohar-Cretnik said on Wednesday.

So far, no case of the South African or Brazilian variants has been confirmed in the country while 35 cases of the British variant have been confirmed. It is believed that new variants are not widespread in Slovenia.

Zohar-Cretnik said that a possibly greater presence of the new strains was suggested by information that of the 35 cases of the British variant, 21 refer to people who did not travel anywhere, which means that they got infected locally.

Epidemiologists have warned that the decline in the number of new infections has stopped in the past few days, namely that it is stagnating, even though the number of fatalities has been falling and the situation in hospitals has been improving. An above-average increase in new infections has been reported in communities on the Slovenian Adriatic coast.

Currently, 546 Covid-19 patients are hospitalised, of whom 105 are in intensive care units, however, the increased reproduction number and some other elements indicate that the planned relaxation of restrictions, to include physical classes for all school grades and the end of the current curfew, could be delayed even though it had been announced for early March, the media reported, quoting a study by the Jozef Stefan Institute.

Prime Minister Janez Jansa said in the parliament on Tuesday that due to the new coronavirus variants, Slovenia and Europe could be caught in a third wave of the Covid-19 epidemic and that that was a fairly realistic scenario.