Bulgaria is scrapping mass school closures and flu holidays during ordinary seasonal flu waves. The health ministry is drawing up new rules, already agreed with the National Centre of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases and regional health inspectors.
The ministry's legal team is now checking the document. Once that's done, the health minister will sign it.
Only the chief state health inspector will be able to order nationwide anti-epidemic measures and flu holidays, and only in extreme cases, such as a particularly severe strain spreading. During a pandemic, regional inspectors and hospitals will still have to be ready to reorganise and open extra beds.
The focus is shifting to personal responsibility, prevention and vaccination. From September, people will be advised to wash and disinfect their hands often, keep their distance, wear a mask if they have symptoms, and stay home if they're sick — all on a voluntary basis.
Until now, things worked differently. Health inspectors tracked infection rates, and once numbers hit critical levels, they called flu holidays, tightened checks at nurseries, and halted hospital visits, non-urgent operations and GP check-ups.
Experts point to three problems with that approach. The measures only kicked in after the peak, by which time most children had already caught the flu, and pupils kept mixing elsewhere during the holiday anyway, so closing schools didn't help. On top of that, halting child and women's health check-ups threw off the vaccination schedule and disrupted the rest of GPs' work.
Experts say the vaccine is the only reliable protection against the virus, especially for high-risk groups. Children and older people get it free under national programmes, and the vaccination drive will start as soon as Bulgaria's allocated doses arrive.
European countries don't close schools en masse over seasonal flu — they rely on vaccination instead.
So far, no flu virus has shown up in samples tested at the National Reference Laboratory at the infectious diseases centre — mostly rhinoviruses have turned up instead.