A medical staff member takes a nasal swab from a visitor (C) to test for the Covid-19 coronavirus at a virus testing centre in Seoul on February 9, 2022. (Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP)
Seoul [South Korea]: South Korea reported a record high of 383,665 daily COVID-19 cases as of midnight Friday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 6,206,277, the health authorities said Saturday.
The daily caseload was sharply up from 282,983 in the previous day, surpassing the previous high of 342,433 tallied on Wednesday, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
The recent resurgence was driven by infections in the Seoul metropolitan area amid the Omicron variant spread.
Of the new cases, 80,437 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 107,941 and 23,735 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 171,477, or 44.7 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 75 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 30,206.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,066, down 50 from the previous day.
A total of 269 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 10,144. The total fatality rate was 0.16 percent.
The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,903,107 people, or 87.5 per cent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,428,431, or 86.6 per cent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,064,014 people, or 62.5 per cent of the population. (ANI/Xinhua)
