Croatia's health authorities reported on Friday that 1,442 new cases of the coronavirus and 9 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in the country over the previous 24 hours.

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 9,107 – or on average 1,301 per day, a 10 percent drop compared to the seven days prior. The 14-day case count is now 19,282 – or on average 1,377 cases per day, nearly 3 percent down from the the previous two-week period, indicating that case count is stabilizing back to levels from mid-March.

The daily death count fell into single digits for only the second time in the past month. As of Friday, the rolling seven-day death count is 89, a 5 percent increase from 89 deaths in the week prior. There are currently 9,976 active cases in the country, including 657 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 15,584. 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 now say translates to 59.4 percent of the country’s entire population. This is the calculation released by health authorities which project the current population size at 3.88 million, in line with the results from the 2021 census released in January by the state statistics bureau.

This figure includes 2.24 million Croatians who have been fully immunized against the disease, which health services now say translates to around 68.6 percent of all adults, implying that there are currently some 3.26 million Croatians aged 18 and above living in the country.

The vaccination drive has almost ground to a halt, but until this week, the same numbers were regularly reported and disseminated by the media as representing 56.9 percent of the country’s entire population, and around 65.7 percent of adults, as authorities seemed to have been using outdated estimates saying that there are just under 4.1 million people in Croatia, including 3.4 million aged 18 and up.

Even though the vaccines are widely available and free of charge, the interest in vaccines among pandemic-fatigued Croatians is reportedly very low – on Thursday authorities reported that only 852 vaccine shots had been administered that day in the entire country, including just 101 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.