March 30, 2020 - In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, the Zagreb earthquake piled on the suffering of citizens of the Croatian capital. Al Jazeera Balkans follow Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and Health Minister Vili Beros as they respond to the crisis.

The timing - never perfect - was exceptionally cruel. 

In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, and with Croatian authorities working extremely effectively to limit movement and communicate their actions and updates to a concerned public, disaster struck at 06:24 on Sunday, March 22, 2020. 

An initial earthquake with a magnitude of 5.5 a few kilometres north of Zagreb was followed by several more throughout the morning and the day. 

Citizens were given a terrible choice of facing corona on the streets or being trapped inside buildings. One 15-year-old child subsequently died after being struck as her building collapsed from the initial quake. There were heartbreaking scenes at Dubrava Hosptial of mothers with newborns huddled in shock outside - all thoughts of social distancing erased from memory. 

With the double disaster of COVID-19 and the Zagreb earthquake, responding to the disaster required cool heads in crisis. 

Robert Tomic Zuber, with his latest documentary for Al Jazeera Balkans, followed two of the key players in managing the chaos currently engulfing Croatia - Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and Health Minister Vili Beros. Beros has only been in the job for two months, and his crisis management of the coronavirus crisis has quickly turned him into a cult figure and a cult hero. 

You can see Tomic Zuber's Revizija programme in the video below, complete with English subtitiles.   

For the latest on the coronavirus crisis, follow the dedicated TCN section. 

For the latest on the Zagreb earthquake aftermath, click here. 

In addition to his work with Al Jazeera Balkans, Robert Tomic Zuber has recently launched a new portal called R+, full of powerful video stories about coronavirus, told by people in the Balkans, and by people from the Balkans all over the globe. You can learn more about it here. 

March 30, 2020 - Total Croatia News is delighted to announce that it has joined Robert Tomic Zuber's new R+ project, starting tomorrow. 

These are crazy times to be in the media in the Balkans (although, thinking about it, I am not sure there is ever a normal time in this fabulous but troubled region), and the fast pace of change in the way information and media is consumed these days means that news portals will have to adapt or die. 

It all seems so different to that distant memory in October 2011, when I opened my laptop with a beer in Jelsa on Hvar and typed up my first happy tourism piece for my new blog, Total Hvar. 

From a Hvar blog to three Google News portals covering Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia has been a challenge to keep up with, even without the acceleration of technological change. 

But there is no point trying to fight the inevitable. The era of the blogger as a man of words and long articles is going to become a lot more niche than it was, and video is definitely one growth area. 

I hate doing video and being on camera, but I am learning that it has become a necessity in the modern media world. 

I am grateful to various people I have met and worked with this year - Andreas Wil Gerdes, Gustavo Vilera and Robert Tomic Zuber - the latter one of the region's most accomplished documentary makers - for showing me the baby steps into this inevitable new media world that TCN will be forced to enter. 

Talk of different strategies have been energising (and terriftying), but it was only when I saw in the flesh what young Zuber was putting together for his new R+ media channel, with an initial focus on corona (what else?) that I really began to understand the power of the new approach, particularly in this new era of self-isolating social distancing. Online communications will become ever more important, and video using simple technology can tell individual stories from literally all over the planet in one place. 

Robert Tomic Zuber's R+ launched just over a week ago, as reported by TCN. It showcases stories from the region, as well as stories of people from the region in other places. To give you a flavour, below you can find the top 5 most viewed videos in the early days or R+. Almost all the videos are bilingual with subtitles. 

TCN will be joining the R+ network to support the Man from Pula, and our first video report will air on the R+ website tomorrow morning. It will feature TCN CEO Paul Bradbury from his terrace on Hvar talking about the realities of trying to run an independent news portal in Croatia during the corona era. As you can see from the lead photo, the technology is not the most sophisticated, but it does the job. With thanks to Miranda Milicic Bradbury for the video and Janja Sestak for the translation for the Croatian subtitles. 

If you like the view, I will be doing more video updates on various topics for TCN from the terrace while we all wait to get our lives back. 

In other news, I have started to grow a beard for the first time in 25 years, so if nothing else, the video update might be fun to monitor progress. 

The Top 5 most popular R+ videos so far:

Report from a hospital in Pula, Croatia

Zagreb, Be Strong

Kisses from New York

From Madrid... With Love, Marko

Notes from isolation | by Boba Đuderija

You can visit the R+ YouTube channel here.

ZAGREB, March 30, 2020 - A new package of measures to boost the economy is expected by the end of this week and it will be comprehensive and robust and directed towards protecting entrepreneurs, workers and the private sector, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Monday after meeting with Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandić.

Plenković advised that the second package of measures for the economy is being prepared and that it should be ready for this week's cabinet meeting.

The April package of measures will be comprehensive and robust, he said, and "will continue to be directed towards entrepreneurs, workers, protecting the private sector, and it will have a complete message about what we can expect in the economic and social sense in the months ahead of us."

"When that package is entirely completed, when we agree on it first in the government and then through the process of consultations, we will present it to the public by the end of this week," the prime minister said.

He assessed that the government had reacted promptly with its economic measures.

The first package, he said, was presented this month, "a month we will probably remember for a long time in the political sense, the economic sense and, unfortunately, in terms of the earthquake in Zagreb which pretty much turned around everything the government had planned and done."

"The government reacted very quickly and many of those measures are already being implemented and have had a very good response by those they refer to," said the prime minister.

He rejected the idea of establishing an economic crisis authority similar to the national civil protection authority and said that the government would establish a group of economic experts, people from the business world who can help the government and perhaps correct any possible measures that the ministries themselves did not come up with.

"We will listen, we will have an inclusive approach, but the responsibility and final decisions on moves regarding the economic policy is up to the government," said Plenković.

Asked by reporters whether banks' business would be facilitated via benefits so they can more easily finance and lend to citizens so consumption does not decline, Plenković said that everything that is being done to ensure the state's financial stability and liquidity is not being done solely by the government but by the Croatian National Bank too.

"Respecting the independence of institutions, we will continue to jointly coordinate all activities, taking account of the banking sector too" concluded Plenković.

More coronavirus news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

ZAGREB, March 30, 2020 - UNICEF on Monday delivered four tonnes of professional protective and medical equipment to Croatia in an effort to respond to the current crisis caused by coronavirus.

The first shipment of protective gear has been delivered from UNICEF's Copenhagen-based warehouse and the shipment includes 30,000 medical masks and 30,000 protective gloves and 18,000 protective overalls, 4,000 bags for safe disposal of medical waste, 2,500 protective caps and 130 pairs of protective gumboots.

Considering the growing needs and challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic UNICEF is continuing its campaign and calls on its partners, the media, companies and citizens to be involved and support the campaign with their donations.

The donations are earmarked to obtain ventilators and medical equipment to the most vulnerable patients, protective gear for health workers, disinfectants and hygienic products, UNICEF said in a press release.

In addition to supplying equipment, the organisation will launch programme activities to ensure credible information and expert guidelines in an effort to help prevent the spread of the virus and to support the permanent provision of health protection, education and social services.

More coronavirus news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

March 30, 2020 — Police laid spike strips across the road leading to Murter, a small island off the Croatian coast. It has the dubious honor of being the country’s only fully-quarantined location. A triage ambulance stays on the island, creating a de facto mobile COVID-19 treatment center. Delivery trucks carrying food and medicine can only reach the border, then await a police escort.

How did the virus manage to shut down a relatively remote island of reportedly 2,500 residents?

The answer lies in the weeks before Croatia’s nationwide lockdown.

The Dalmatian coast experienced a surge in foreign visitors in early March, as well as continental residents flocking to weekend homes on the coast — Murter among them. The coronavirus outbreak loomed over the horizon, as confirmed cases rose every day before the government shut down all nonessential business on March 19.

“With the start of the preseason in Murter, there was obviously a mix-up with Western European populations," according to county head Goran Pauk.

Locals who spoke with Total Croatia News confirmed Pauk’s assertion. They recalled the island cars registered in foreign countries zipping around the island and locales filled with unfamiliar faces. Murter's patient zero was likely asymptomatic. Small villages breed closer encounters, with infected locals unwittingly spread the virus to their neighbors. The sources requested anonymity for fear of adding to a game of broken telephone often prevalent in smaller villages. 

A similar wave of visitors from Western Europe and continental Croatia hit many other islands and coastal villages, well before the government barred people from leaving their legal residence.

Residents along the coast reportedly complained it was a demographic shift at the wrong time. Similar migrations from affluent cities to vacation homes helped the spread of coronavirus in other Western European countries, notably Italy.

Reports of Slovenians and Italians posting up in their weekend homes on the coast began trickling — in particularly from islands off Zadar’s coast. Dugi Otok and Preko, two islands within the Zadar archipelago, asked authorities to help track the influx of foreigners. 

Many settled down to ride out the pandemic on the coast. Locals complained they violated the government’s strict self-isolation rules. Some reportedly weren’t registered through eVisitor, the Croatian government’s main tool for tracking guests within the country.

Zadar’s local police asked residents to help report any unregistered arrivals. By then, Murter was well on its way towards a quarantine.

“Murter is not big and we can see in recent days that there is an increased amount of cars with foreign license plates,” the island’s Tourist Board Director Mateja Bašić told Jutarnji List days before the quarantine. “There are a lot of people moving here who do not live here over the year. They are mostly domestic, but there are also foreigners who have decided to stay here since the whole virus story began.”

It’s not that Murter and other smaller settlements didn’t try to slow COVID-19’s spread. The town’s Civil Protection Directorate introduced rules limiting the number of customers allowed into closed spaces and closing all non-essential businesses on March 16, five days before the Croatian government’s own measures.

Murter has become a small-scale version of what could await larger cities and towns across Croatia, should they face a similar spike in infections.

Locals cannot leave the quarantined area. Roads leading to the island’s settlements are bookended by a police checkpoint. Delivery trucks need a police escort into and out of the village, and drivers are not allowed to leave their trucks.

Murter’s quarantine began on March 25, after 15 cases were recorded on the island. The municipality introduced the strictest limits on movement in the country. Teams were created to care for the elderly. Like many islands, Murter’s population is overwhelmingly elderly, with numerous health problems and sparse medical options. The smaller societal circle also means higher odds of exposure.

“We don’t know who was in contact with who,” said Toni Turčinov, Murter’s mayor in the days after the quarantine. “We were all in contact with some infected person. We don’t know what to do or who to address.”

For the latest on coronavirus in Croatia, check out the dedicated TCN section.

ZAGREB, March 30, 2020 - The Social Democratic Party (SDP) wants parliament not to stop sitting for as long as the coronavirus epidemic lasts, recommending that parliament should sit from Monday to Friday and not from Wednesday to Friday as is now the case.

The chairman of the SDP's parliamentary group, Arsen Bauk, sent a letter to Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković on Monday calling for the current sitting to continue until 3 April as previously scheduled and that during that time the Sabor should sit every working day.

There are still 81 items on the agenda that have not been discussed yet, and the SDP forwarded a package of nine bills to parliament on March 27 aimed at supporting the economy during the crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic and which the party believes should be debated as soon as possible at a plenary session.

The strongest opposition party also proposed that at the meeting of the Sabor's presidency, scheduled for 1 April, a decision be adopted according to which the agenda would prioritise items related to relieving the health and economic consequences of the coronavirus epidemic.

The SDP further suggested that the number of lawmakers allowed to be present at the same time during a plenary session be determined using the same criteria as when determining the number of MPs per parliamentary group who can ask questions during Question Time and that the parliament's working bodies and presidency meetings be held via video conference due to the extraordinary circumstances.

More coronavirus news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 30th of March, 2020, the main hospital in Sisak, the Dr. Ivo Pedisic General Hospital, is the first in all of Croatia to use robots with UV lamps in the fight against coronavirus, which has recently proven to be a successful practice over in China, where the outbreak began.

Sisak-Moslavina County has bought the device for the hospital for half a million kuna (about 65,000 euros) from the Danish company UVD Robots.

According to the specifications, the robot can kill 99.999 percent of bacteria in the space it is in in a mere ten minutes, it also kills also viruses, including the coronavirus COVID-19. The UVD Robots machine moves at a speed of 5.4 km/h and can withstand two and a half hours of disinfection on one single charge. It looks like an autonomous smart vacuum cleaner, which is already on sale in Croatia, but has a stronger base and above it is a 171 centimetre vertical stand with UV-C (254 NM) UV lamps that illuminate the entire room.

If the lamps aren't switched on, then the robot has an autonomy of movement of eight hours. It takes three hours to recharge. Using UV-C light, the robot destroys DNA and RNA molecules, which are a key part of bacteria and viruses, and this process is successful for disinfecting surfaces in various spaces as well as for air disinfection.

The director of the Sisak General Hospital, Dr Tomislav Dujmenovic, told the Župan.hr portal that they had placed the robot in the infectology department after receiving the first case of coronavirus and were already actively using it in other hospital facilities.

"We placed it in the infectology department, so after the departure of a person infected with coronavirus, the robot thoroughly disinfects the space, after which the arrival of staff and every subsequent patient is safe," says Dr. Dujmenovic.

The Danish company Blue Ocean Robotics, which is a subsidiary of UVD Robots, received an award back in early March from one of the largest robotics associations in the Europen Union, euRobotics, for launching a public-private partnership in the field of robotics with the European Commission. The EC earmarked 700 million euros in incentives for robotics for the period between 2014 and 2020.

UV robots like the one developed by the aforementioned Danish company resulted in 77 percent bacteria reduction in intensive care units and 83 percent in operating rooms in a hospital in Taiwan in a recent test.

Back in mid-February, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, the Chinese medical equipment distributor Sunay Healthcare Supply contracted a collaboration agreement with the Danish company UVD Robots. The plan is to sell robots manufactured in Denmark to more than 2,000 hospitals in China. The Danish company states that they currently have customers for their robots in more than 40 countries across Asia, Europe and the US.

It's worth mentioning that after the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, China began working on developing and manufacturing its own UV robots, and plans to use them even to disinfect public transport.

The World Health Organisation initially confirmed that UV lamps could destroy coronavirus, but then withdrew the statement and recommended that UV lamps not be used without the supervision of professionals. Namely, home and hobby use of UV lamps can lead to skin cancer and therefore no experimentation is recommended. Regular soap, they say, is just as good for coronavirus disinfection.

Follow our dedicated section for rolling information and updates in English on coronavirus in Croatia.

March 30, 2020 — The Croatian government’s proposal to track citizens’ locations during the coronavirus outbreak is taking shape. It would create a dedicated app or text messages for citizens ordered into isolation, according to one of Prime Minister Andrej Plenković's closest advisors.

ational Security Advisor Robert Kopal said tracking measures could include using location data provided by telecommunications companies, applications installed onto devices, or sending text messages to those who’ve been ordered into isolation. Those who refuse monitoring could be forced into quarantine.

The measures Kopal described in an interview with N1 come as governments across Europe consider monitoring their citizens to slow the virus’s spread. But forcing Europeans to voluntarily install digital monitoring tools onto their devices may be a tough sell, especially after the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) created a hullabaloo over data privacy.

The Croatian government's measure tries to skirt the line by targeting people directed into self-isolation and only tracking current location — not movement.

“There is no monitoring of location or movement, only for people who are in self-isolation,” Kopal said in the interview. “If they leave the perimeter, it is visible, nothing else.”

Kopal emphasized the focus on singular locations and not movement — a distinction meant to placate fears of a nanny state hoarding data and profiling citizens’ routines and encounters. It’s a sensitive issue for Croatians still wary of government overreach after life in the former Yugoslavia.

Kopal added the measures would be instated “only when the health and lives of citizens could not be effectively protected otherwise.”

The measure comes as civil society groups urge caution over the government’s current restrictions on freedom of movement, claiming cutbacks on freedoms must be proportional to the threat.

The proposed amendments to Croatia’s Telecommunications Act first must pass parliament, where it faces uncertainty. Social Democrats decry the measure, claiming it bypasses Constitutionally-prescribed procedures. 

The Croatian constitution allows personal freedoms to be curtailed in extreme circumstances such as war. The Parliament must enact these sorts of laws with a two-thirds majority vote, which some Social Dems argue applies to the government’s tracking ammendment.

The law may also run afoul of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Plenkovic’s government pointed to the urgency of the pandemic and claimed the GDPR allowed such a bill. 

“Passing this Act is part of measures aimed at enabling urgent and adequate treatment of all competent authorities in newly emerged special circumstances in relation to a declared COVID-19 disease epidemic and the need to protect the lives and human health through the use of the said data,” the amendment states.

Others have suggested Croatia’s constitutional court must provide guidance on the proposal’s feasibility. The Constitutional Court can weigh in on its own, at the request of a citizen, or at the request of those proposing the law, Kopal said. It can also put a freeze on the law’s implementation until its constitutionality is weighed.

The proposed tactics follow’s Taiwan’s, which reportedly uses a phone-based “fence” to keep at-risk residents in their homes with some success. Whether that'll translate to Europe remains uncertain. Poland’s rollout of a similar tracking application has been reportedly panned as buggy.

Croatia’s daily press briefings on the coronavirus’s spread include a count of how many Croats ignored orders to self isolate. The number often approaches the triple digits. Kopal said such behavior can only hurt long-term efforts to slow the virus’s spread.

“The fact remains that the Government, in the explanation of the amendments to the Act, clearly stated the need to enact it in these exceptional and extraordinary circumstances and pointed out the proportionality of restrictions (among other conditions) for the protection of human health, which is a basic constitutional requirement.” Kopal said.

ZAGREB, March 30, 2020- Grape farmers from the northern Croatian region of Međimurje will be able to cross the border into Hungary to tend to their vineyards there despite the border restrictions Hungary has introduced to fight the coronavirus epidemic, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Sunday.

Szijjarto said that he and his Croatian counterpart Gordan Grlić Radman had agreed on cross-border commuting in areas near the border, according to the Hungarian news agency MTI.

The Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Ministry did not respond to Hina's query about the agreement.

Szijjarto says that Croatian grape farmers from Međimurje recently contacted him about the border restrictions preventing them from crossing over to Hungary to farm their grapes.

"And if they do not finish the work now then there certainly won't be any harvest," he said on Facebook.

The Hungarian minister said that he had phoned his counterpart Gordan Grlić Radman and they quickly agreed to enable commuting over the border.

"The two police captains will work out the details and spring work can start," Szijjarto said.

More news about relations between Croatia and Hungary can be found in the Politics section.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 30th of March, 2020, the financial markets are in constant turmoil, the level of uncertainty is extremely high, and all this will require very careful management of budget financing, the governor of the Croatian National Bank, Boris Vujcic, said.

''The Croatian National Bank (CNB) has taken a number of measures to maintain exchange rate stability, strengthen the financial system's liquidity and revive the government bond market. The main measures were promptly announced to the general public, with all the aims that were initially sought. In mid-March, we intervened four times on the foreign exchange market totalling €1.6 billion to stabilise it. That's what we've achieved, the exchange rate has now been stabilised. The second objective was to create additional, and partly longer-term, cheap liquidity. On regular and structural operations, we created 4.5 billion kuna of additional, mostly long-term liquidity for banks at a very low interest rate,'' said Boris Vujcic, according to a report from Vecernji list.

''We've placed the funds for banks for five years at an interest rate of 0.25 percent, and short-term loans are at an interest rate of 0.05 percent. Thirdly, since the additional liquidity created by banks didn't reach other financial institutions and threatened to freeze the government securities market, which would adversely affect the financing conditions of all domestic sectors, we intervened in regard to that market as well. The situation was such that when we announced our interventions, even the market for the highest quality German Government securities was under a huge amount of stress. At two auctions, we purchased 4.3 billion kuna in government bonds, which is the first time the CNB has acted in such a manner,'' Boris Vujcic went on to explain.

''Finally, given the need for additional funding from the state due to the package of measures released in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic, we reduced the reserve requirement last week, freeing up an additional 10.5 billion kuna. These amounts cannot be added together because they're different measures. While foreign exchange interventions convert kuna liquidity into foreign currency, the bank financing operation and the redemption of bonds create additional kuna liquidity, and lowering the reserve requirement rate gives banks existing liquidity blocked by central bank monetary measures. However, all of these moves were complementary and were aimed at preserving favourable financing conditions for all bank clients despite the economic downturn and huge disruptions affecting global financial markets, all while maintaining exchange rate stability,'' Vujcic said, adding that government funding would could facilitate the expected increase in private savings that will ultimately require secure investments. On the other hand, financial markets are facing constant upheaval, uncertainty is extremely high, and this will all require very careful management of budget financing, the governor noted.

''We're entering a health crisis from a position of considerable surplus in the current and capital account, in other words, we've got higher exports than imports, and higher capital inflows than capital outflows. We've used this surplus in recent years to repay foreign currencies and strengthen our foreign exchange reserves, which is our first shock absorber in a situation where exports fall. Although funding conditions have tightened for emerging markets, including the Croatian market, borrowing is still possible. We'll only spend more on reserves if the coronavirus crisis escalates. If that does happen, it will be a sign that our foreign exchange reserves have served a purpose and that we've been able to maintain domestic demand. The CNB's gross reserves, even after the foreign exchange interventions that stabilised the exchange rate after the outbreak of the epidemic, are in excess of €17 billion,'' Boris Vujcic assured.

''The foreign exchange assets of banks needs to be added to that, which amount to approximately five and a half billion euros, and they can serve the same purpose as foreign currency reserves. Foreign exchange sold recently are mainly in the foreign exchange assets of banks and therefore haven't disappeared from the country's financial system,'' Boris Vujcic concluded.

For rolling information and updates in English on coronavirus in Croatia, follow our dedicated section. For more on the Croatian economy, follow our business page.