LJUBLJANA, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- Slovenia on Wednesday recorded 1,850 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the national tally of confirmed cases to 161,684, according to the National Institute of Public Health.
The national COVID-19 tracker site Sledilnik showed that the country currently has 17,905 active cases. A total of 1,144 patients were treated in hospitals, 172 of them in intensive care. Nineteen new deaths took the death toll to 3,425.
Slovenia has retested 877 samples of positive PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests for coronavirus from the last two weeks, with 16 of them showing two genetic changes matching the new variant of coronavirus first identified in the UK.
Tjasa Zohar Cretnik, the head of the National Laboratory for Health, Environment and Food, told media on Wednesday that "for the time being" the coronavirus variant has not spread extensively in the country.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in many European countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 236 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Jan. 26.
