Croatia's health authorities reported on Wednesday that 2,294 new cases of the coronavirus and 15 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in the country over the previous 24 hours.

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 9,774 – or on average 1,396 per day, a 5 percent drop compared to the seven days prior. However, the 14-day case count is now 20,044 – or on average 1,432 cases per day, nearly 6 percent up from the the previous two-week period, indicating that case count is slowly rising again, having reached the lowest levels in mid-March.

The daily death count rose back into double digits for the sixth day in a row. As of Wednesday, the rolling seven-day death count is now 87, still a 7 percent decrease from 93 deaths in the week prior. There are currently 9,878 active cases in the country, including 651 Covid patients in hospital care – the lowest number since mid-September.

To date, Croatia has registered more than one million coronavirus cases, and the total pandemic-related death toll now stands at 15,563. This amounts to an average of 20.3 deaths per day since the first case was detected in Croatia on February 25, 2020.

Some 2.31 million Croatians have received at least one shot of any Covid-19 vaccine to date, which health authorities say translates to 56.9 percent of the country’s entire population. This is the calculation released by health authorities, which project the current population at little under 4.1 million, even though the latest 2021 census figures released in January by the state statistics bureau put the current population size at 3.88 million.

This figure includes 2.24 million Croatians who have been fully immunized against the disease, which health services say translates to around 65.7 percent of adults, implying that there are currently some 3.4 million Croatians aged 18 and above living in the country.

At the same time, the vaccination uptake rate has slowed to a trickle. Even though the vaccines are widely available and free of charge, the interest in vaccines among pandemic-fatigued Croatians is reportedly very low – on Tuesday authorities reported that only 811 vaccine shots had been administered that day in the entire country, including just 100 first-timers. Booster shots have been available since December, but authorities do not include these statistics in their daily reports.

The daily numbers come from official reports which only account for cases confirmed by PCR tests and which are reported daily to the World Health Organization and other international agencies. Positive results detected via rapid antigen testing (RATs), including at-home tests, are reported and tracked via a separate registry. These are sometimes leaked to the local media who conflate these with officially confirmed figures, creating considerable discrepancies in their reporting.