Hungary’s planned reopening of schools and kindergartens on April 7 now appears “optimistic”, Zoltan Maruzsa, a state secretary in charge of education, said in a newspaper interview published on Thursday.

Hungary’s hospitals are under “extraordinary” pressure from rising coronavirus infections, its surgeon general said on Wednesday, as the country became a hotspot in the third wave of a pandemic that has hit Central Europe especially hard.

“We can rule out that the entire school year will be spent in remote learning. However, it takes some degree of optimism to take the April 7 reopening for granted,” Maruzsa told the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.

“For now it looks more likely that a return to classroom teaching can take a while longer, but we also need to see the developments of the next few days to assess that,” he said.

Hungary leads the European Union for vaccine imports and per capita vaccination rates, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. It has administered at least one vaccine dose to 1.7 million people.

However, the country now ranks the first in the world in COVID-19 deaths as a share of the population over the past seven days, according to Our World in Data.

As of Wednesday, Hungary reported 593,710 COVID-19 cases and 18,952 deaths, representing some 0.2% of its population.

A central banker said on Wednesday that he expected no quick relaxation of current lockdown measures in force since November, adding that a partial easing could be expected sometime in the second half of the year.

REUTERS