  Fluctuations of conserved charges calculated on the lattice which can be
measured experimentally, are well reproduced by a hadron resonanse gas model at
temperatures below T_{ch} ~ 155 MeV and radically deviate from the hadron
resonance gas predictions above the chiral restoration crossover. This behavior
is typically interpreted as an indication of deconfinement in the quark-gluon
plasma regime. We present an argument that this interpretation may be too
simple. The argument is based on the scaling of quantities with the number of
colors: demonstration of deconfinement and QGP requires observable that is
sensitive to N_c^2 gluons while the conserved charges are sensitive only to
quarks and above T_{ch} scale as N_c^1. The latter scaling is consistent with
the existence of an intermediate regime characterized by restored chiral
symmetry and by approximate chiral spin symmetry which is a symmetry of
confining interaction. In this regime the energy density, pressure and entropy
density scale as N_c^1. In the large N_c limit this regime might become a
distinct phase separated from the hadron gas and from QGP by phase transitions.
A natural observable that associates with deconfinement and is directly
sensitive to deconfined N_c^2-1 gluons is the Polyakov loop; in the N_c=3 world
it remains very close to 0 at temperatures well above chiral crossover, reaches
the value 0.5 around 3T_{ch} and the value close to 1 at temperatures ~1 GeV.
