Two percent of Croatia's population has been vaccinated against Covid-19 so far, only a third from what had been planned if the pre-ordered quantities of the vaccine had been delivered on time, epidemiologist and member of Croatian government's coronavirus advisory council, Branko Kolaric, told N1 television on Monday.

Croatia has a population of roughly four million, which would mean that some 80,000 Croatians have been inoculated since the first shipments of coronavirus vaccine had been delivered in late December.

He dismissed speculations in the local media that around half of the entire population had contracted the disease. He explained that local health authorities consider people healthy automatically ten days after they had tested positive for the coronavirus, since that is the average duration of the disease.

“Many other parameters are taken into account, and the percentage of (diseased people) is much lower, around 10-20 percent, or 25 percent at most,” he said.

Asked to comment on cases when influential officials skipped the line to get themselves and their family members vaccinated, Kolaric said that this is “not good” – but also warned against making registers of vaccinated people public.

“That means we might as well go public with registers of people diagnosed with HPV or some other disease, and that’s never going to happen,” Kolaric said.