South Korea reports 202,721 new COVID-19 cases

SEOUL – South Korea reported 202,721 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Monday, raising the total number of infections to 4,869,691, health authorities said Tuesday.

The daily caseload was down from 210,716 in the prior day, but it was 1.5 times higher than a week earlier, 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, 37,483 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 52,729 and 12,603 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 99,832, or 49.3 percent of the total local transmissions.

Among the new cases, 74 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 29,906.

The number of infected people who were in serious condition stood at 1,007, up 52 from the previous day. It rose above 1,000 in about two months.

Read more: South Korea reports 210,716 new COVID-19 cases

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,880,845 people, or 87.5 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,400,545, or 86.5 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 31,868,296, or 62.1 percent of the population.