Croatia's health authorities reported on Friday that 726 new cases of the coronavirus and 8 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in the country over the previous 24 hours.

The rolling seven-day case count now stands at 4,061 – or on average 580 per day, a nearly 16-percent drop compared to the seven days prior. The 14-day case count is now 8,900, or 636 cases per day, about 3 percent down from the the previous two-week period.

The weekly case counts have been hovering at around 4,000-5,000 for the past three weeks, while the 14-day figures seem to be stabilizing after a slow but steady increases over the past few weeks.

On Wednesday, the rolling seven-day death count was 46, slightly down from 52 deaths reported in the week prior. There are currently 4,583 active cases in the country, including 361 Covid patients in hospital care, the lowest level since August 2021.

To date, Croatia has registered more than 1.13 million coronavirus cases, and the total pandemic-related death toll now stands at 15,920. This amounts to an average of about 19.8 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 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 68.7 percent of all adults, implying that there are currently some 3.26 million Croatians aged 18 and above living in the country.

Although the vaccination numbers have been pretty much unchanged for some time now, the slight increase in percentages in early April seems to have come from a change in methodology, as up until recently the authorities used outdated estimates saying that the country has close to 4.1 million people, including 3.4 million adults.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 520 vaccine shots had been administered in the entire country that day, including 99 first-timers. 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.

In addition, all pandemic-related travel restrictions for foreign nationals have also been dropped in early May.