Croatia's health authorities reported on Thursday 1,538 new cases of the coronavirus and 18 Covid-related deaths in the country over the previous 24 hours.

Croatia’s daily caseloads have been falling nearly every day after the most recent surge – fueled by the more contagious Omicron variant of the virus – had reached its peak in late January.

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 9,426, or on average 1,346 per day, around 3 percent down from last week and at the lowest level since October 2021. The 14-day case count is now 19,158, or on average 1,368 cases per day, nearly 54 percent down from the the previous two-week period. The death count is also falling, with 136 deaths recorded over the past seven days, compared to 182 in the week prior.

As of Thursday, there were 10,015 active cases in the country, including 819 Covid patients in hospital care, a five-month low. To date, Croatia has registered more than 1 million of coronavirus cases, and the total pandemic-related death toll now stands at 15,308. This amounts to an average of about 20 deaths per day since the first case was detected in the country on February 25, 2020.

Meanwhile, 2.3 million Croatians have received at least one shot of any Covid-19 vaccine so far, which health authorities 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.

Some 2.23 million Croatians have been fully immunized against the disease to date, which health services claim translates to around 65.6 percent of adults – which implied that there are currently 3.4 million adults living in the country.

However, the vaccination effort has almost ground to a halt. Even though the vaccines are widely available and free of charge, the uptake is very low – on Thursday authorities reported that close to 1,300 vaccine shots had been administered that day, including only 162 first-timers. Booster shots have been available since December, but authorities do not include the numbers of booster shots in their daily reports.

The daily figures 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, including at-home tests, are reported and tracked via a separate registry which are sometimes leaked to the local media and get conflated with official figures.