BELGRADE – The jump in the number of patients infected with Coronavirus increased significantly in Serbia on Saturday, 6 June, compared to Friday, 5 June, but at the same time the number of cured people increased from 6,931 to 11,056 in a day.
Epidemiologist Predrag Kon explained that there was a jump in the number of cured patients because all of those who were discharged from treatment with one negative finding, and 28 days passed, have been removed from the list of active cases.
“Administratively, because it was possible that way… They were not treated as cured, but only as discharged,” said Kon.
Doctor Darija Kisić Tepavčević said that at the last meeting of the Crisis Staff of the Government of Serbia on Friday, a decision was made to “relax” the current “strict” approach to the supervision of COVID-19.
According to that decision, in asymptomatic patients, one negative PCR test is enough, instead of the previous two, for a person to be considered healthy, and for the time of monitoring the course of the disease to be shortened in those patients, she explained.
According to Kisić Tepavčević, this now means that people who are diagnosed with the virus and do not have signs of the disease, after a clinical examination, go to home isolation, and not to a temporary hospital. They remain in home isolation, she added, for 14 days, and if they do not develop any symptoms of the disease by then, they do a PCR test and if they are negative, they are marked as healthy.
Apart from health explanations, this calculation has another dimension. To enter Montenegro, for example, it is necessary that the country from which citizens enter has less than 25 infected per 100,000 inhabitants. That criterion has now been reached.
“Now the conditions for opening the border with Serbia have been met, well, I welcome the news, I knew that the conditions would be met because it is important for their tourism, and also because the conditions that were set, that is, the reason not to they opened the borders for the citizens of the Republic of Serbia, were completely political, had nothing to do with health”, said the Prime Minister of Serbia Ana Brnabić.
Epidemiologist Zoran Radovanović told that this is an illogicality that is difficult to defend, adding that these people were healed by “a decree and an administrative decision”.
When asked by Nova.rs whether such a decision could have anything to do with the possibility of our citizens entering Montenegro, Radovanović assessed that Montenegrins are not “crazy”, but he is still aware that our neighbours need tourists.
In the last few days, the number of infected people in Serbia has been increasing. The symptoms in patients are weaker, but epidemiologist Radovanović warns that the virus has not weakened, it is only harder for him to find a new host.
“In the two student dormitories where the patients came, these are new hotspots, also in the sports center where several athletes fell ill, this is a new hotspot in the work facilities, all these are new hotspots if we call them ‘pockets’, we reduce verbal significance, but we are not essentially changing anything, it is even better, to be honest, and call it by its real name,” Radovanović concluded.