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

According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, the country reported 14,518 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 777,497.

The daily caseload was up from 13,010 the previous day, keeping a record-breaking trend for the third consecutive day.

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 became a dominant strain here.

Of the new cases, 3,385 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 4,738 and 1,010 respectively.

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

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 5,168, or 36.1 percent of the total local transmission.

Among the new cases, 217 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 24,451.

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 350, down 35 from the previous day.

Thirty-four more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 6,654. The total fatality rate was 0.86 percent.

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,605,045 people, or 86.9 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 43,904,632, or 85.6 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 26,043,358, or 50.7 percent of the population.