Xinhua News Agency
SEOUL — South Korea’s daily number of COVID-19 cases hit a fresh record high amid the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus, the health authorities said on Friday.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 16,096 more confirmed cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 793,582.
The daily caseload was up from 14,515 in the previous day, continuing to break previous records for four days in a row.
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 in the country.
Of the new cases, 3,946 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 5,143 and 1,228, respectively.
The virus also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 5,577, or 35.1% of the total local transmissions.
Among the new cases, 202 were imported from overseas, lifting the total tally for the category to 24,649.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 316, down by 34 from the previous day.
Twenty-four more deaths were confirmed from the pandemic, bringing the death toll to 6,678. The total fatality rate was 0.84%.
The Asian country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,615,896 people, or 86.9% of the total population, and the number of the fully inoculated people was 43,931,494, or 85.6% of the population.
The number of the people who have received their booster dose was 26,359,222, or 51.4% of the population. (Xinhua)  -ag
