Coronavirus Toll Rises to 139, 7,276 Infected

Zoran Gojkoivc (Beta/Serbian Government/Slobodan Miljevic)

In Serbia over the past 24 hours five more people died of the coronavirus bringing the death toll to 139, the authorities announced on April 23.

Provincial Secretary for Health Zoran Gojkovic told a news conference that 7,276 people in Serbia had the disease while 3,477 people had been hospitalized and 96 patients were on ventilators. A total of 1,063 people have been cured.

Epidemiologist Predrag Kon said on April 13 that "just as we reacted with austere measures in a timely fashion right at the very beginning we will leave the lockdown and enter normal life at the proper time," adding that this would take time and that "there will be no sudden disconnect when normal life can resume."

Speaking on what it meant that we were exiting this situation, he said that the country was exiting a period of intense activity of the virus. Kon stressed that we were talking about the epidemic in Serbia while, he warned, on the global level things were heating up because the virus was moving to the southern hemisphere where health care systems were incomparably weaker.