SEOUL, Feb 17 (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 here, today.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 93,135 more cases of COVID-19, for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 1,645,978.
The daily caseload was up from 90,443 the previous day, hovering above 90,000 for the second day in a row.
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 in the country.
Of the new cases, 19,678 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 28,438 and 7,232, respectively.
The virus spread also raged in non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 37,694, or 40.5 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 90 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 27,748.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 389, up 76 from the previous day.
Thirty-six more deaths were confirmed, bringing the death toll to 7,238. The total fatality rate was 0.44 percent.
The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,768,136 people, or 87.2 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,261,075, or 86.2 percent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 29,898,777 people, or 58.3 percent of the population.– NNN-YONHAP
