Seoul, March 16 South Korea reported a record high of 4,00,741 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 7,629,275, the health authorities said on Wednesday.
The daily caseload was sharply up from 362,329 in the previous day, topping 400,000 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, Xinhua news agency reported.
Of the new cases, 81,395 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 94,806 and 28,453 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 204,654, or 51.1 per cent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 117 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 30,475.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,244, up 48 from the previous day.
A total of 164 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 11,052. The total fatality rate was 0.14 per cent.
The country has administered Covid vaccines to 44,914,731 people, or 87.5 per cent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,443,726, or 86.6 per cent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,185,393 people, or 62.7 per cent of the population.
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