Croatia's health authorities reported on Friday that 1,815 new cases of the coronavirus and 10 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in the country over the previous 24 hours.

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 10,175, or on average 1,453 per day, a 3 percent drop compared to the seven days prior. However, the 14-day case count is now 20,656, or on average 1,475 cases per day, which is close to 8 percent up from the the previous two-week period – indicating that case counts are slowly rising again.

The daily death count is back in double digits after it had fallen to 9 on Thursday. As of Friday, the rolling seven-day death count is now 85, still a 17 percent decrease from 102 deaths in the week prior. As of Friday there were 11,186 active cases in the country, including 628 Covid patients in hospital care.

To date, Croatia has registered more than one million coronavirus cases, and the total pandemic-related death toll now stands at 15,495. This amounts to an average of about 20 deaths per day since the first case was detected in the country on February 25, 2020.

At the same time, some 2.31 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.

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 3.4 million adults 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 is reportedly very low – on Wednesday authorities reported that only 905 vaccine shots had been administered that day, including just 169 first-timers. Booster shots have been available since December, but authorities do not include these statistics 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 (RATs), including at-home tests, are reported and tracked via a separate registry which are sometimes leaked to the local media who conflate them with official figures.

Last week, the government announced easing of some Covid restrictions still in place, including the lifting of limits on crowd size for public events which require Covid passes, extending the legally allowed closing times for bars and restaurants, and scrapping the mandatory rapid testing for schoolchildren.