Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Monday that the further efforts to contain the current wave of the Covid pandemic would go into three directions: promoting a booster dose, stepping up checks on whether people adhere to the indoor mask-wearing rules, and possibly online teaching for some schools.

After a regular meeting of the leadership of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) on Monday afternoon, Plenkovic said that Education Minister Radovan Fuchs and local Covid-19 response teams would establish if some of the schools should switch to online teaching and that also the authorities “are thinking of extending the autumn (school) holidays to last the whole week” so as to lessen the circulation of the virus.

He recalled that a whole set of measures and anti-epidemic rules are in effect, however, all of us in the country “seem more relaxed than we ought to be”.

Prime Minister called on citizens to get vaccinates, and underscored that nearly 8 in 10 Covid patients on ventilators are unvaccinated.

Commenting on the final guilty verdict in the Ina-Mol case under which a former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader was given six years for graft and Mol CEO Zsolt Hernadi two years, Plenkovic said that the judgement was conducive for Croatia’s arguments in the international Ina-Mol arbitration process.

He said that the legal representatives had been informed of the verdict and were told to add that to Croatia’s documentation.

The premier said that this year’s economic growth would be higher than 8% and would thus offset the negative GDP in 2020.

Plenkovic said that President Zoran Milanovic had contacted him about convening a meeting of the Defence Council an added that a meeting of the National Security Council should be convened for the same day.

Commenting on the recent final verdict in the Fimi Media corruption case in which the HDZ was fined and ordered to pay back to the budget 14.3 million kuna, Plenkovic said that the party would probably paid that money into the budget on Tuesday.