  The equation of state and fluctuations of conserved charges in a strongly
interacting medium under equilibrium conditions form the baseline upon which
various possible scenarios in relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments are
built. Many of these quantities have been obtained in the lattice QCD framework
with reliable continuum extrapolations. Recently the
Polyakov$-$Nambu$-$Jona-Lasinio model has been reparametrized to some extent to
reproduce quantitatively the lattice QCD equation of state at vanishing
chemical potentials. The agreement was precise except at low temperatures,
possibly due to inadequate representation of the hadronic degrees of freedom in
the model. This disagreement was also observed for some of the fluctuation and
correlations considered. Here we address this issue by introducing the effects
of hadrons through the Hadron Resonance Gas model. The total thermodynamic
potential is now a weighted sum of the thermodynamic potential of the
Polyakov$-$Nambu$-$Jona-Lasinio model and that of the Hadron Resonance Gas
model. We find that the equation of state and the fluctuations and correlations
obtained in this hybrid model agrees satisfactorily with the lattice QCD data
in the low temperature regime.
