South Korea reports 395,598 new COVID-19 cases

SEOUL – South Korea reported 395,598 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Wednesday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 10,822,836, the health authorities said Thursday.

The daily caseload was down sharply from 490,881 in the previous day, 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, 77,768 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 107,472 and 24,689 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 185,602, or 46.9 percent of the total local transmission.

Read more: South Korea reports 209,169 new COVID-19 cases

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,081.

A total of 470 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 13,902. The total fatality rate was 0.13 percent.

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,936,300 people, or 87.6 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,465,651, or 86.6 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,483,092 people, or 63.3 percent of the population.