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

According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 49,567 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 1,131,239.

The daily caseload was sharply up from 36,719 in the previous day, surpassing 49,000 for the first time.

The recent resurgence was driven by infections in the Seoul metropolitan area amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which became a dominant strain here.

Of the new cases, 11,630 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 13,641 and 3,912 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 20,219, or 40.9 percent of the total local transmission.

Read more: S.Korea reports 36,719 more COVID-19 cases

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 285, up 17 from the previous day.

Twenty-one more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 6,943. The total fatality rate was 0.61 percent.

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,701,330 people, or 87.1 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,156,016, or 86 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 28,587,836 people, or 55.7 percent of the population.