The critical region around the critical end point (CEP) has been mapped in the \(2+1\) flavor renormalized Polyakov quark meson (RPQM) model. The consistent treatment of the quark one-loop vacuum fluctuation gives the improved chiral effective potential of the renormalized quark meson (RQM) model, where the parameters are fixed by relating the counterterms in the on-shell scheme to those in the minimal subtraction \(\overline{\text {MS}} \) scheme. The \(U_A(1)\) anomaly strength gets significantly stronger and the light (strange) explicit chiral symmetry breaking strength becomes weaker by a small (relatively large) amount after renormalization in the RQM model. The effect of the above novel features, on the extent of critical fluctuations around the critical end point, has been quantified by drawing the contours of enhanced quark number susceptibility in the presence of the Polyakov loop potential.