The head of the Croatian Institute of Public Health (HZJZ), Krunoslav Capak, said on Monday that two people in the country had been found to be infected with the new Covid variant, Omicron.

The two patients have not developed any serious symptoms of the infection and all their contacts are under surveillance, Capak told a news conference.

The patients had been at a business meeting, and there are possibilities that other participants could have caught it, too, said epidemiologist Bernard Kaic.

According to Capak, Croatia has taken all the necessary measures to slow down the spread of the new variant.

In the past 24 hours, Croatia has registered 728 new COVID cases while 51 people died of the infection, the national COVID response team reported on Monday.

There are currently 25,567 active cases in the country, including 2,444 hospitalised patients with 326 patients on ventilators. More than 23,000 people are self-isolating.

Since 25 February 2020, when the first case of the novel coronavirus was registered in Croatia, there have been a total of 631,756 cases of the contagion and 11,269 people have died as a consequence while 594,929 have recovered, including 4,588 in the past 24 hours.