The first samples of coronavirus-positive tests from the northern Croatian city of Varazdin have arrived at Zagreb's Dr. Fran Mihaljevic Hospital for Infections Diseases to establish if the new strain of the virus has reached Croatia, Jutarnji List daily reported on Tuesday.

The Fran Mihaljevic Hospital director, Alemka Markovic, confirmed that an interdisciplinary team involving a number of institutions was starting to sequence a larger number of samples from northern Croatia, including Zagreb, to determine possible mutations in relation to the coronavirus from the first wave.

“When we see how strongly the line jumped in the Varazdin area, much more than (the rest of) Croatia, no one who knows about viruses can help but feel that it can’t be related only to non-compliance with the measures, because similar situations, at least according to what was known, occurred in other parts of Croatia, yet there the numbers didn’t rise so much,” she said.

Asked on what grounds was it assumed that a mutated strain had entered the Varazdin area, what differentiated the patients there from those elsewhere in the country, and since when was the mutated virus suspected to have been in that area, Markotic said one should be cautious and that “the sudden rise in the number of patients in a short time doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the variant imported from the UK.”

Prefect Radimir Cacic said Varazdin County “has totally crushed the virus. Whether it’s the new strain or the old one, whichever it is, it’s been crushed. For the new strain the measures are the same. I have no idea what strain it is, but we have results. It’s lucky both for us and all of Croatia, which imposed measures a week later (than Varazdin County), that we insisted on them. The number of infections has been halved.”

The head of the Varazdin County COVID-19 response team, Robert Vugrin, said he would rather not speculate on the new strain either. “We received absolutely no information on a new strain of the virus. No one told us there was even suspicion of that, let alone that we should do something about it. The only fact is that the numbers are falling, which doesn’t point to any difference in the virus strain.”