S.Korea’s daily COVID-19 cases hit record high at 13,012

SEOUL – South Korea’s daily number of new COVID-19 cases hit a new record high due to the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus, the health authorities said Wednesday.

According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 13,012 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 762,983.

The daily caseload was up from 8,571 in the previous day, topping 10,000 for the first time here since the country’s first case was found in January 2020.

The recent resurgence was attributable to cluster infections in the Seoul metropolitan area amid the spread of the Omicron variant, which, the health authorities said has become a dominant strain here.

Of the new cases, 3,110 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 4,184 and 860, respectively.

The virus also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 4,589, or 36.0 percent of the total local transmissions.

Among the newly reported COVID-19 cases, 269 were imported from overseas, lifting the total number for this category to 24,234.

Read more: S. Korea reports 7,513 more COVID-19 cases

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition was 385, down by seven from the previous day.

Thirty-two more deaths were confirmed from the pandemic, bringing the total death toll to 6,620. The total fatality rate was 0.87 percent.

The Asian country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,594,919 people, or 86.9 percent of the total population, and the number of fully vaccinated people was 43,878,415, or 85.5 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 25,787,293, or 50.3 percent of the population.