Croatia's registered Covid caseload hits three-month high

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 7,357 – or on average 1,051 per day, a significant jump from 801 per day in the seven days prior, and four times higher than 246 cases per day reported in early June. The 14-day case count is now 12,966, or 926 cases per day, a three-fold increase from the the previous two-week period, which averaged 332 cases per day.

The 14-day case rate is now the highest on record since mid-April.

On Friday, the rolling seven-day death count was 31, up from 23 deaths reported in the week prior. There are currently 8,220  registered active cases in the country, including 339 Covid patients in hospital care.

To date, Croatia has registered 1.15 million coronavirus cases. and the total pandemic-related death toll now stands at 16,101. This amounts to an average of close to 19 deaths per day after the initial 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 59.5 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 results released in January.

This figure includes close to 2.24 million Croatians who have been fully immunized against the disease, which health services now say translates to around 68.8 percent of all adults, implying that there are currently some 3.25 million Croatians aged 18 and above living in the country.

Although the vaccination numbers have been pretty much unchanged for many months now, the slight increase in percentages reported by authorities in early April seems to have come from a change in methodology, as up until recently the authorities used outdated estimates saying that the country had close to 4.1 million people, including 3.4 million adults.

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 173 vaccine shots had been administered in the entire country, including just 33 first-time doses. Booster shots have been available since December 2021, 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.

Due to the low intensity of reported cases, the government scrapped nearly all pandemic rules in April, which included ending nearly all face mask rules and also Covid passes which were required for using any public administration service. However, masks are still required in some public areas, mainly in hospitals and in retirement homes. All pandemic-related travel restrictions for foreign nationals have also been scrapped in early May.