One summer, 58 confirmed cases and 8 deaths. From 2011 to 2025, fourteen years combined - 54 cases and 5 deaths. Those are the figures MP Sanja Lukarevska took into parliament when she put her first question to Health Minister Saso Klekovski.

One summer has outstripped the entire previous decade and a half. That is not a statistical detail - it is a change in reality.

The question was about children

Lukarevska asked whether urgent inspections had been carried out in school yards and their surroundings, whether standing water where mosquitoes breed had been removed, whether the public health institute and the municipalities had inspected and treated school premises, whether there are screens on windows and doors, and whether parents and pupils have been informed about periods of risk.

She pointed out that the protocol for the start of the school year contains no specific measures against mosquito-borne transmission, and that the five municipalities with a declared epidemic - Aerodrom, Kisela Voda, Butel, Gazi Baba and Ilinden - are acting inconsistently.

The answer was about age

Klekovski replied that all necessary measures had been taken in good time, including emergency disinsection in the municipalities with a declared epidemic. The key sentence was: "The youngest infected patient was 25 years old and we have not had a single case under 25, and accordingly no special protective measures were taken." Pupils, according to the minister, are not a risk group. The focus is on citizens over 60, where the risk is highest.

The minister added that the virus is unpredictable and the number of cases cannot be tied directly to the intensity of spraying alone.

Six patients are currently hospitalised in serious condition, two of them on ventilators.

The logic that does not hold all the way

The minister's argument is epidemiologically correct - severe cases really do hit older people. But he is answering a question that was not asked. Lukarevska did not ask whether children would end up on ventilators. She asked whether there is a protocol for when the building in which they spend six hours a day sits in a municipality with a declared epidemic.

Removing standing water from a school yard is not a measure to protect pupils - it is a measure to reduce the mosquito population in a neighbourhood where those same over-60s live, the group the minister called the most at risk. The yard is not sealed off from the neighbourhood.

Eight people dead in one summer. That is a figure that calls for a plan, not an explanation of why no plan was needed.