Montenegro has administered 148,255 doses of coronavirus vaccine as of Wednesday, which means that close to a quarter of the country's 620,000 population has been vaccinated so far, the country's health ministry said on Wednesday.

About 113,500 citizens have received the first dose, and nearly 35,000 have been fully immunized.

Montenegro has vaccinated comparatively more people than its neighbors Albania, Northern Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Moldova, the press release, carried by Croatian state agency Hina, said.

Montenegro was initially late in procuring the vaccine for its citizens, receiving the first doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine at the end of February in a donation from Serbia. Afterwards, the country received 50,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine from China, and 24,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the Covax program from the EU in April.

By early May, only 6 percent of the Montenegrin population had been vaccinated. However, mass vaccination was then launched in May, when 200,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine arrived from China, and in the meantime the first doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine donated by the European Union had arrived.

In the first three months of 2021, Montenegro was among the countries with the highest number of active cases and daily infections. However, thanks to tight restrictions introduced in mid-March, the number of active cases dropped from about 10,000 to 1,300 today. The number of new daily cases has been under a hundred for weeks now.

In the latter half of April, Montenegro eased almost all restrictions. Wearing masks outdoors and indoors remains mandatory for all Montenegrins aged five or more.