SLOVENIAN Health Minister Tomaz Gantar said on Monday that he would propose that the government introduce, by the end of the week, quarantine for Slovenian holidaymakers returning from Croatia, stressing that this was a unanimous position of medical experts.
If the government adopts a decision to that effect on Wednesday or Thursday, Slovenian tourists wishing to avoid quarantine will be given "two to three days at the most" to return home, Gantar told the public broadcaster.
Gantar mentioned "exponential growth" of new cases in Croatia
Gantar said that he did not believe the decision could be changed in case the number of new coronavirus cases imported by Slovenian holidaymakers returning from Croatia dropped or the number of new daily cases dropped because the number of new cases in Croatia "has already been growing at an exponential rate lately."
He also stressed that it was not possible to adopt a selective approach under which only those aged 15-35, who contract the disease most frequently, or those who come from epidemiologically less risky counties like Istria, would have to go into quarantine.
Gantar explained that the first option would make no sense because people travelling to Croatia are mostly families with children, while the second option was out of the question because so far Slovenia had always applied unified criteria when compiling its list of risky destinations, putting countries rather than regions on it .
Gantar, however, did not mention that a month ago Slovenia put the Czech Republic on its red list but after a letter from Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis to Slovenian PM Janez Jansa, its warning stayed in force only for one mining region where an increase in infections had been reported.