ZAGREB, December 6, 2020 - Concerned by the second wave of the pandemic spreading in Croatia and the high death toll, 26 prominent Croatian doctors and scientists from the country and abroad launched a public appeal on Sunday and made recommendations for overcoming the severe public health and social crisis in Croatia.

They said that only with great solidarity and commitment of the entire society can we resist this great challenge.

"We would like to distance ourselves from all the statements that based on incorrect data assured the public in November that the epidemic in Croatia would stagnate or wane and that we did not need stricter measures or that they were not effective. We also distance ourselves from estimates that the virus had weakened in any way, because they are not in line with scientific knowledge," they said in the appeal.

Strictest anti-epidemic measures should be adopted

When it is established that the spread of the infection has gone out of control, it is necessary, it was underscored, to activate preventively and without delay the strictest measures for curbing the epidemic that are politically and economically possible in Croatia. This respects the principle of prevention and prevents the occurence of a high number of infections, instead of having to treat them, with hospitals being overloaded with infected persons.

It is necessary to ensure quality and transparent information on the spread of the infection.

The communication on the pandemic needs to be improved to restore the trust in people managing the crisis, they said.

The signatories of the appeal call for a register, that is a publicly accessible tally, which will count the number of the persons infected with coronavirus, the number of persons in self-isolation, and provide information about hospitalisation numbers and the hospitals giving treatment to those persons. Such tally should give information about available capacities in COVID hospitals, with the exact number of beds for patients who need intensive care treatment.

The signatories say that the daily statistics about the COVID-fatalities in hospitals should also include the data on persons who die from COVID complications outside hospitals.

They call for resolute action in testing and for conducting a higher number of tests in the conditions of the intensive spread of the infection and "the lost control over the epidemic", so that the percentage of positive tests could drop from 30%, as it is currently the case, to below 5%.

The appeal urges the authorities to specify key epidemiological parameters for imposing or lifting of certain anti-epidemic measures so as "to lessen the uncertainties in the society."

The signatories say that in their capacities as experts they do not recommend any decisions which would not be applied to everybody and in this context they criticise any politicisation of measures and their adjustment to some of the social groups.

This (epidemic) is a problem concerning the whole Croatian society and we all are affected, and therefore only solidarity and concerted action of the whole society can help us to manage this huge challenge.

The appeal was sent by researcher Ivica Djikic on behalf of another 25 signatories.

The other signatories are Andreja Ambriovic Ristov, Nenad Ban, Ilija Brizic, Luka Cicicn-Sain, Stipan Jonjic,  doc.dr.sc. Vanda Juranic Lisnic, Petra Klepac, Vanja Klepac-Ceraj, Branko Kolaric, Vladimir Krajinovic, Marko Kutlesa, Pero Lucin, Kresimir Luetic, Igor Mezic, Bojan Polic, Kristijan Ramadan,  Igor Rudan, Marija Santini, Mihaela Skobe, Sasa Srica, Igor Stagljar, Goran Tesovic, Andrej Trampuz, Boris Ujevic and Domagoj Vucic.

ZAGREB, December 6, 2020 - Over the past 24 hours, Croatia has registered 2,899 new cases of the coronavirus infection and 72 related deaths, the national COVID-19 crisis management team said on Sunday.

The number of active cases in Croatia stands at 23,740. There are 2,543 COVID patients in hospitals, including 264 on ventilators.

Since February 25, when Croatia registered its first case of the infection, a total of 150,353 people have contracted the novel coronavirus, 2,174 of them have died, and 124,439 have recovered, including 3,582 in the last 24 hours.

There are currently 57,295 people in self-isolation.

To date, 810,885 people have been tested for coronavirus, including 9,340 in the last 24 hours.

ZAGREB, December 5, 2020 - The head of the COVID-19 crisis management team in the northern city of Varazdin said on Saturday that the spread of coronavirus could not be stopped in Varazdin County until the hotspots in industrial plants were dealt with.

After the Varazdin City Council's special session on the occasion of the City Day, observed on 6 December in memory of the city's patron saint, St. Nicholas, the COVID-19 crisis management team's head  Zlatan Avar said that the hotspots of the infection had occurred in industrial plants and added that in some factories between 30% and 40% people had contracted the virus.

Avar called on the city's authorities to finance rapid antigen tests in the area and in this context he praised the example set by the City of Zagreb.

You can see incidence rates for the municipality of Kneginec, Trnovec Bartolovecki and Varazdin where there are industrial plants, and the situation in those places is worse than elsewhere in the county, Avar said.On Saturday, the local authorities confirmed 319 new infections with coronavirus and nine deaths linked to this disease in the last 24 hours.

In the last seven days, the coronavirus incidence rate in the county was 1,170 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The city's hospital is currently treating 262 COVID-19 patients, of whom 21 are in intensive care wards.

Since the onset of the epidemic, 132 people in the county have died of the complications linked to the COVID-19 disease.

County crisis response team head refutes claims about hotspots in factories

The head of the COVID-19 crisis management team for Varazdin County, Robert Vugrin, said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon that more stringent restriction imposed in the county two weeks ago had led to the stagnation of new cases. 

He refuted Avar's claims about hotpsots in the industrial plants and said that local transmissions had led to a surge in the number of new infections.

The director of the Varazdin hospital, Nenad Kudelic said that today the hospital registered 10 fewer COVID patients than yesterday and that this decrease had occurred after a streak of many days with a rise in hospitalisation numbers.

ZAGREB, December 5, 2020 -  A total of 4,084 new coronavirus cases and 70 infection-related deaths have been confirmed in Croatia in the last 24 hours, the national coronavirus response team said on Saturday.

The number of active cases currently stands at 24,495. It includes 2,514 patients receiving hospital treatment for COVID-19, of whom 259 are on ventilators.

Since February 25, when the first case of the infection was confirmed in the country, 147,454 people have been infected with the novel virus, of whom 2,102 have died and 120,857 have recovered, including 3,709 in the last 24 hours.

Currently 60,581 people are in self-isolation. A total of 801,545 people have been tested to date, including 10,662 in the last 24 hours.

ZAGREB, December 4, 2020 - Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic is ready to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in public and fully supports the campaign of promoting COVID-19 vaccination, the government's spokesman Marko Milic said on Friday.

The spokesman explained that PM Plenkovic has contracted the coronavirus virus and is currently in isolation, which is why he will hold the necessary consultations with doctors on the appropriate time for him to be vaccinated.

Since the very beginning Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic has fully and publicly supported vaccination as the method to immunise people against the COVID-19 disease. Having in mind that in the period when the delivery of COVID-19 vaccine doses will start, Plenkovic will be one of those who have recovered from that disease and he will hold the necessary consultations with doctors on the appropriate time for his vaccination, as suggested by Health Minister Vili Beros earlier in the day, Milic said in his answer to Hina's inquiries.

Milic reiterated that medical professionals, retirement home staff and residents as well as old-age citizens and patients suffering from chronic diseases will be the first to get the COVID-jabs.

Croatia has pre-orders 5.6 million doses of vaccine, Pfizer's expected to arrive first

Croatia has pre-ordered 5.6 million doses of coronavirus vaccine, and the vaccination could start with the Pfizer vaccine, which is expected to arrive first in 125,000 doses, Croatian Public Health Institute director Krunoslav Capak said earlier today.

Capak said that the European Union had entered into negotiations with six manufacturers, and the first agreement presented to Croatia was the one with AstraZeneca.

Croatia has pre-ordered 3.6 million doses of vaccine from that manufacturer but was allocated 2.7 million because of the huge interest of other EU member states, so it has pre-ordered 900,000 doses from Johnson & Johnson. After that, a million doses have been pre-ordered from Pfizer and Moderna each, and 300,000 doses from CureVac.

"Croatia has pre-ordered 5.6 million doses of vaccine from different manufacturers, and we have also received an offer from a company that will register its vaccine towards the end of 2021. We will order smaller quantities from it in case this is a seasonal vaccine," Capak said.

The Pfizer vaccine could be registered by December 29, Moderna expects to have its vaccine registered early in January, so it is likely that these two vaccines will be the first to be used in Croatia, given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be registered slightly later in the first quarter of next year, Capak said.

The government says that all information about its activities in the preparations for administering COVID-19 jabs is available on https://www.koronavirus.hr/cijepljenje-protiv-covid-19/872.

President Zoran Milanovic and several senior officials as well as leading epidemiologists have in the meantime expressed readiness to get vaccinated.

ZAGREB, December 4, 2020 - A total of 3,955 new coronavirus cases and 68 infection-related deaths have been confirmed in Croatia in the last 24 hours, the national coronavirus response team said on Friday morning.

The number of active cases currently stands at 24,190. It includes 2,427 patients receiving hospital treatment for COVID-19, of whom 262 are on ventilators.

Since February 25, when the first case was confirmed in the country, 143,370 people have been infected with the novel virus, of whom 2,032 have died and 117,148 have recovered, including 3,639 in the last 24 hours.

Currently 59,417 people are in self-isolation. A total of 790,883 people have been tested to date, including 10,626 in the last 24 hours.

ZAGREB, Dececmber 4, 2020 - The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in Croatia having a serious problem with citizens' lack of trust in state institutions, the Jutarnji List daily says in its Friday issue.

Croatians are more or less satisfied with the work of the national COVID-19 response team even though only 30% of respondents who took part in a survey conducted in August and September this year said they were satisfied with it.

Citizens are even less satisfied with the work of other relevant institutions, and they are the least satisfied with the work of parliament (only 12% are satisfied) and the government (20%).

Since the autumn and winter of 2020 are a particularly challenging period in terms of the spread of the coronavirus infection, since citizens are exhausted by the process of dealing with the crisis and the government and other relevant stakeholders are expected to make responsible and demanding decisions to protect public health while preserving the economy, it is of key importance to invest effort to make citizens trust the relevant institutions and call on them to cooperate.

This is the conclusion of the first comprehensive survey of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation's mental health and its social consequences.

The survey, financed by the Croatian Science Foundation and covering 1,060 respondents, was conducted by a team of psychologists, sociologists and political scientists as part of a research project dedicated to social recovery following the coronavirus crisis.

The project is headed by Professor Dinka Corkalo Biruski from the Psychology Department of the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

A rather interesting finding is that roughly the same percentage of respondents said that they do not worry at all (15.3%) or worry very much (14.1%) about getting infected with coronavirus.

Also, two in three respondents said their current standard of living is the same as before the crisis, which makes it seem that in the period before the survey was conducted the crisis did not have a major impact on people's assessment of their standard of living.

The poor fear the consequences of the pandemic the most.

The special circumstances citizens had to deal with during the pandemic are perceived as moderately stressful, with the uncertainty regarding the duration of the pandemic being the factor that causes the most stress, the daily says.

ZAGREB, Dec 2, 2020 - The healthcare system capacity has been strained to the utmost but the system is functioning, the director of the association of employers in the healthcare system, Drazen Jurkovic, said at a news conference in Cakovec on Wednesday.

Earlier on Wednesday, a delegation of the association visited hospitals in four northern Croatian cities -- Varazdin, Cakovec, Koprivnica, and Bjelovar -- after which they held a news conference to inform the public of their findings.

Jurkovic said that the system was operating at full capacity and was functioning.

He admitted that the biggest challenge in the current coronavirus epidemic was how to organize the health system, adding that problems with drug suppliers had been settled in the short run and that the problem of unpaid overtime in the health sector remained to be solved.

The system is resilient, it can respond to all challenges, said Jurkovic.

The president of the association, Mladen Busic, praised medical professionals -- physicians, nurses and medical technicians -- as well as non-medical staff in the four hospitals for their extraordinary contribution to the fight against COVID-19.

"The healthcare system has not collapsed and will not collapse. We are dealing with this situation and will win and provide all the patients with the necessary care, both COVID-19 and other patients," Busic said.

The head of the Cakovec hospital, Tomislav Novinscak, informed the delegation that currently, 110 COVID-19 patients were being treated in the hospital and that some of them would be transferred to a local hotel that has been repurposed to admit COVID-19 patients.

He added that the situation with the available medical staff was stable. 

In Varazdin, the local hospital is treating 257 persons diagnosed with COVID-19, and of the 24 are in intensive care wards. The head of that hospital, Nenad Kudelic, expects hospital capacity to be fully occupied until the end of this week, and that 40 more COVID-19 patients could be transferred to the hospital for medical rehabilitation in Varazdinske Toplice. More than 120 employees of the Varazdin hospital are out of work due to infection with COVID-19 or self-isolation.

Kudelic said that one could not say that the system was collapsing, however, it should be made clear that the current high number of COVID-19 patients required hospital and personnel capacities that would otherwise be used for the treatment of other diseases.

The head of the Koprivnica hospital, Mato Devcic, said that there were currently 82 COVID-19 patients in the institution, and eight of them were on ventilators. The hospital has allotted 110 beds for COVID-19 patients and a maximum of 200 beds can be used for that purpose.

The system is not on its knees, it is adapting to the extraordinary circumstances, Devcic said.

In Bjelovar, the head of the hospital, Allouch Ali, said that 80 beds were made available for COVID-19 patients and that an additional 40 could be made available.

"The situation is under control," he said.

ZAGREB, Dec 2, 2020- The SUH pensioners' union and the "Treca Dob" association of aged persons on Wednesday warned of neglect of elderly people in private aged care facilities, particularly during the pandemic, and called for urgent control of those facilities.

"Even though Minister Josip Aladrovic has informed that the number of welfare inspectors has doubled (to possibly 20) and that criteria for private facilities have been made stricter, in reality, there has not been any improvement," the pensioners' associations said.

Some beneficiaries are in absolute isolation and are not receiving regular health and welfare attention or support and we are getting more and more reports of residents in aged care facilities that their movement is being restricted and personal hygiene has been reduced and that they are not being fed regularly or even being given water. Some are not being showered at all but just wiped down with wet wipes, they say.

The worst thing is that considering they are not allowed to leave these facilities their fundamental rights are being jeopardized, the SUH and the NGO said.

"Due to a shortage in staff, they are not being fed regularly, showered, allowed to step out in the yard, to call family and everything is being justified with the COVID-19 situation."

In those facilities where social welfare workers are employed, they cannot be reached on the phone and are rude to residents and their families, and cover up all the misdoings, SUH said.

The associations called on the Ministry of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy to urgently take action and form an expert inquiry commission that will systematically investigate the situation in these facilities.

They also call for a reform of the welfare inspection and for its de-centralization and for citizen volunteers to be introduced who will be allowed to enter these facilities.

ZAGREB, Dec 2, 2020 - The European Commission on Wednesday outlined a strategy for sustainably managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming winter months, underscoring that every 17 seconds this infection takes a life in Europe.

In its strategy, the EC points out that winter is "a period that can bring a risk of increased transmission of the virus owing to specific circumstances such as indoor gatherings," which is why the strategy "recommends continued vigilance and caution throughout the winter period and into 2021 when the rollout of safe and effective vaccines will occur."

The European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides, warned of the risks stemming from gatherings and celebrations during the Advent, Christmas and New Year holidays.

"We cannot jeopardize the efforts made by us all in recent weeks and months. This year, saving lives must come before celebrations. But with vaccines on the horizon, there is also hope. All Member States must now be ready to start vaccination campaigns and roll-out vaccines as quickly as possible once a safe and effective vaccine is available."

The Commission will then provide further guidance on a gradual and coordinated lifting of containment measures.

Considering the latest guidelines for member-states, the strategy highlights physical distancing and limiting social contacts, testing and contact tracing, and safe travel.

The EC says that physical distancing and limiting social contacts are key for the winter months, including the holiday period. "Measures should be targeted and based on the local epidemiological situation to limit their social and economic impact and increase their acceptance by people."

Testing and contact tracing are perceived as "essential for detecting clusters and breaking transmission."

"Most Member States now have national contact tracing apps. The European Federated Gateway Server (EFGS) enables cross-border tracing," says the EC.

Pandemic fatigue

The Commission says that "pandemic fatigue and mental health are natural responses to the current situation."

Member States are urged to follow the World Health Organisation European Region's guidance on reinvigorating public support to address pandemic fatigue. Psychosocial support should be stepped up too.