SEOUL, Feb 5 (NNN-YONHAP) – South Korea’s daily number of COVID-19 cases hit a new record high, amid the spread of the Omicron variant, the health authorities said today.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 36,362 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 971,018.
The daily caseload was up from 27,443 the previous day, surpassing 36,000 for the first time.
The recent resurgence was driven by cluster infections in the Seoul metropolitan area, amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which became a dominant strain here.
Of the new cases, 8,564 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 10,419 and 2,494, respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 14,685, or 40.6 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 200 were imported from overseas, lifting the total number to 26,167.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 269, up 12 from the previous day.
Twenty-two more deaths were confirmed, bringing the death toll to 6,858. The total fatality rate was 0.71 percent.
The country administered vaccines to 44,674,323 people, or 87.1 percent of the population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,092,874, or 85.9 percent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 27,952,416, or 54.5 percent of the population.– NNN-YONHAP
