South Korea reports record high of over 600,000 new COVID-19 cases

SEOUL – South Korea reported a record high of 621,328 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Wednesday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 8,250,592, the health authorities said Thursday.

The daily caseload was sharply up from 400,711 in the previous day, topping 600,000 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, 128,375 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 181,983 and 32,964 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 277,944, or 44.7 percent of the total local transmission.

Among the new cases, 62 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 30,537.

Read more: South Korea reports record high of over 400,000 new COVID-19 cases

A total of 429 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 11,481. The total fatality rate was 0.14 percent.

The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,917,475 people, or 87.5 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,446,716, or 86.6 percent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,217,533 people, or 62.8 percent of the population.