SEOUL – South Korea reported a record high of 400,741 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Tuesday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 7,629,275, the health authorities said Wednesday.

The daily caseload was sharply up from 362,329 in the previous day, topping 400,000 for the first time, 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, 81,395 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 94,806 and 28,453 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 204,654, or 51.1 percent of the total local transmission.

Among the new cases, 117 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 30,475.

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,244, up 48 from the previous day.

Read more: South Korea reports 362,338 new COVID-19 cases

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,914,731 people, or 87.5 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,443,726, or 86.6 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,185,393 people, or 62.7 percent of the population.