South Korea reports 254,327 daily COVID-19 cases

SEOUL, March 5 – South Korea reported 254,327 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Friday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 4,212,652, the health authorities said Saturday.

The daily caseload was down from the record high of 266,853 in the previous day. The total cases topped 4 million five days after surpassing 3 million, 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, 53,191 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 70,243 and 18,838 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 111,978, or 44.0 percent of the total local transmission.

Among the new cases, 77 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 29,656.

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 896, up 99 from the previous day.

Read more: South Korea reports 198,803 new COVID-19 cases

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,870,094 people, or 87.4 percent of the total population, and the number of the fully inoculated people was 44,388,199, or 86.5 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 31,746,117 people, or 61.9 percent of the population.