SEOUL, Feb 15 (NNN-YONHAP) – South Korea’s daily number of COVID-19 cases hit a record high, amid the spread of the Omicron variant, the health authorities said today.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, the country reported 57,177 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 1,462,421.
The daily caseload was up from 54,619 the previous day, hovering above 50,000 for the sixth consecutive day.
The recent resurgence was driven by infections in the Seoul metropolitan area, amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which became a dominant strain here.
Of the new cases, 12,402 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 17,236 and 4,904, respectively.
The virus spread also raged in non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 22,470, or 39.4 percent of the total local transmissions.
Among the new cases, 165 were imported, lifting the total to 27,493.
The number of infected people who were in serious condition stood at 314, up eight from the previous day.
Sixty-one more deaths were confirmed, bringing the death toll to 7,163. The total fatality rate was 0.49 percent.
The country administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,745,781 people, or 87.2 percent of the total population, and the number of the fully inoculated people was 44,237,550, or 86.2 percent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 29,628,134, or 57.7 percent of the population.– NNN-YONHAP
