With 73 deaths per million people, Croatia topped the EU list of COVID deaths in the past week, Jutarnji List newspaper wrote on Sunday.

It noted that the figure confirms misconceptions about a lower risk of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

“Omicron is a milder variant of the coronavirus and its consequences will not be as disastrous as those of Delta. We could ease the restrictions because hospitals are not being filled with too many patients, there is a mild decrease in infections or their number is stagnating. All these are self-delusions and attempts at downplaying the danger of the coronavirus pandemic which, unfortunately, continues to claim a lot of lives, namely more than 50 daily,” the newspaper said.

Last week the National Bureau of Statistics provided a realistic picture of what the novel coronavirus has done in Croatia in the last two years, because 63,611 people died in 2021 alone, or 12,000 more than in the pre-pandemic year. From March 2020, when the pandemic began in Croatia, until December 2021, there was a 16.9% increase in the number of deaths compared with the five-year average for the period preceding the pandemic, which means that 16,146 more Croatian citizens died.

These grim figures could have been much less frustrating had Croatian citizens got vaccinated like people in the majority of EU countries, as shown by the number of deaths in the last week, Jutarnji List said.

Despite a large number of infections, the Netherlands did not record a single COVID-19 death in the past week. Germany reported 10 deaths, Austria, which has made vaccination mandatory, registered 11 deaths, while Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Denmark had about 20 deaths per million people. All these countries have high vaccination rates, which obviously produces results. On the other hand, Croatia had 73 deaths and Bulgaria 68 deaths per million people, the newspaper said.