In the next two weeks, as of Tuesday, cafes, restaurants, night clubs, shopping malls and stores will close at 9 pm instead of 11 pm and reopen at 5 am the next day across Serbia.

The new, stricter measures will not apply to the food delivery service, petrol stations and the third shift in industries.

Those measures came after COVID-19 has claimed more deaths every day and the number of people infected with the coronavirus has been on the rise, threatening the collapse of the country’s health system.

Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s Prime Minister, said that if the new measures failed to curb the spreading of the infection by December 1, the Government would opt for a curfew to protect the population.

By 3 pm on Monday, the official data showed 21 deaths, 2,813 newly infected people over the previous 24 hours, while 161 patients with the most severe conditions were on ventilators.

Back to March 15, when there were 46 infected people and no deaths, the authorities declared the state of emergency, including a curfew which sometimes lasted up for 80 hours, while people over 65 years of age were banned from leaving homes all the time.

The state of the emergency was lifted on May 6 when the death toll from COVID-19-related complications stood at 203, and 114 new cases of infection were registered over the previous 24 hours.