Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Thursday that 56 percent of 3.3m adult Croatians had received at least one vaccine shot against Covid-19, and warned that in the past week 750 out of 1,000 hospitalized Covid patients were people who had not been vaccinated at all, state news agency Hina informed the public.

“Today we have reached the vaccination rate of 56 percent of the adult population who have received the first dose, which is close to 1.9 million citizens,” Plenkovic said in a televised government session. “Over the past week, out of 1,000 hospitalized patients, as many as 75 percent had not been vaccinated,” he added.

“Out of 15 people aged 40-59 who died over the last seven days, only one had been vaccinated,” he said, and then appealed to everyone to “protect themselves considering the increase in new infections in the past few days.”

Over the last 24 hours, Croatia registered 4,154 new coronavirus cases, 26 patients have died, and 11,320 vaccine doses have been administered. There are currently 22,382 active cases in the country, including 1,231 patients in hospital care, of whom 160 are on ventilators.