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Wednesday saw 134 people test positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus in the Czech Republic, the lowest number since mid-July last year. On average, there were 10 infection cases per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, 113 people required hospitalisation, of which 14 were in intensive care. That is the lowest number since August 2020.

More than 113,000 people were vaccinated on Wednesday. So far, 6.9 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the Czech Republic, with 2.3 million people having received both doses.

The reproduction number lies at 0.65, the lowest it has been since October last year.

The opposition election coalition of the Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independents would win the elections if they were to take place in June with 25.5 percent of the vote, according to a poll conducted by the agency Data Collect for Czech Television released on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO party came in second with 20.5 percent of the vote, followed by the Spolu coalition, made up of the Civic Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the TOP 09 party, with 19.5 percent.

The Freedom and Direct Democracy received 10.5 percent in the poll, followed by the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia with 5.5 percent. The Social Democratic Party, which is currently in a government coalition with ANO, would receive just around 5 percent of the vote according to the poll, meaning it would just manage to fulfill the threshold to get into the Chamber of Deputies. The new Přísaha (Oath) Party, centered around former police chief Robert Šlachta, also polled around the 5 percent threshold.

There was a 267 percent year-on-year rise in the number of cyber attacks launched at the Czech Republic’s health sector in 2020, according to the newly released annual report of the country’s National Cyber and Information Agency (NÚKIB).

The agency warns that last year saw the development of a new, large scale trend of ransomware attacks against health facilities. The most serious incident occurred in March of 2020, when the Faculty Hospital in Brno was the target of a ransomware attack that caused millions of crowns in damages and shut down three departments.

Other targets included the Faculty Hospital in Ostrava, the Regional Hospital in Karlovy Vary, or the Hospital in Benešov.

The number of criminal cases launched by the Czech Republic’s High Public Prosecutor’s Office saw a year-on-year comparative fall by 30,000 cases to a total of 181,924, according to the office’s annual report published on its website on Wednesday.

According to the report, the main reason behind the fall in crime was the coronavirus epidemic. Furthermore, cases are also believed to have fallen due to new legislation launched in October 2020, which raised the minimum threshold for property crimes from CZK 5,000 to CZK 10,000.

Despite the fall in crime, the report states that little has changed in terms of patterns of criminal behaviour. Property crimes remain the most common form of criminal activity. The rate of violent crimes stagnated. Meanwhile, the number of reported cyber crimes continued to rise.