Ljubljana - Health Minister Janez Poklular said on Friday the government would follow the proposal of the Covid-19 task force and expend the recovered-vaccinated rule to all citizens if the epidemiological situation continues to deteriorate. This comes a week after the government decided to impose this rule for civil servants as of October.

In line with the proposal, the recovered-vaccinated rule, meaning omission of testing, would be introduced when two-thirds of beds in intensive care units are occupied by Covid-19 patients. According to Poklular, this is about 150 beds.

"If necessary, we will follow that proposal," the minister said today, adding that the idea was to prevent the collapse of the healthcare system.

Government data show hospitalisations have now topped 400 with 404 Covid-19 patients in hospitals this morning, including 104 in intensive care.

According to the minister, the recovered-tested-vaccinated rule has been showing positive results. He hopes that the drop in the number of new cases will in the coming days also reflect in the number of hospitalisations.

Poklukar said he could not comment on the efficiency of the recovered-vaccinated rule for civil servants at this point because it had not been implemented yet.

Web portal N1 reported that the Constitutional Court has received about 250 motions from civil servants challenging the decree introducing the recovered-vaccinated rule for all state administration employees.

The court said some requests for review would be handled as an absolute priority, the SPS trade union of police officers, one of the petitioners, said on Twitter today.

Poklukar again urged citizens to get vaccinated. "If we insist on the recovered-tested-vaccinated rule, we will soon talk about different measures," he said.