The Slovenian government warned on Friday that a year after the first confirmed coronavirus infection, the epidemiological situation was deteriorating and that the country was at risk from a new wave, especially due to new coronavirus strains.

The government gave the warning despite the fact that it had allowed secondary schools to resume physical classes and announced relaxation of measures for terraces of hospitality establishments.

“We might be facing a new wave of the epidemic,” the director of the National Institute of Public Health, Milan Krek, told a press conference on Friday. He expressed particular concern over the spread of the British variant of coronavirus, which has already been confirmed in Slovenia and is already dominant in some European countries, like the Czech Republic and Italy.

The Slovenian government said on Friday that 881 new cases of the infection had been confirmed over the past 24 hours, with 16.2% of tests returning positive. It warned that the daily number of confirmed infections has been increasing again as of late.

The average number of daily infections in the past week is 780. The number of Covid patients in hospitals has also increased, to 521, 85 of whom are in intensive care units.

It has been a year since Slovenia confirmed its first case of the coronavirus infection. Since then, more than 194,000 Covid cases have been recorded in Slovenia, and 4,113 patients have died to date, half of whom in retirement homes.

Although the government of Prime Minister Janez Jansa was the first in Europe to declare the “end of the epidemic” in May last year, the second wave in autumn affected Slovenia more than most other European countries, and in terms of deaths per capita it is one the most affected countries in the world.

Last week in parliament, Jansa warned that several very difficult months were ahead of his government, which the opposition accused of poor management of the epidemic. According to Jansa, the country could, due to new coronavirus variants, face a dilemma of whether to keep the current restrictions which are not giving the expected results or reintroduce a radical quarantine for several weeks and stop “social life” like last spring.