PRAGUE – Slovakia has become the nation with most COVID-19 deaths by size of population in the world amid a surge of cases from a highly contagious coronavirus variant.
Despite a tough lockdown, the seven-day rolling average of daily deaths in Slovakia has risen from 1.68 deaths per 100,000 people on Feb.
1 to 1.78 deaths per 100,000 people on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University figures issued Tuesday. Portugal, which topped the global table for more than three weeks, dropped to second with 1.48 deaths per 100,000 people. “The most significant factor that has prevented coronavirus cases from falling in Slovakia is a high occurrence of the variant that was found in Britain,” Marek Majdan, a Slovak epidemiologist and vice-rector of