Seoul, March 23 South Korea reported 490,881 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 10,427,247, the health authorities said on Wednesday.
The daily caseload was sharply up from 353,968 in the previous day, marking the second-highest daily figure here, 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, 101,133 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 136,912 and 24,941 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 227,853, or 46.4 per cent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 42 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 30,751.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,084, down 20 from the previous day.
A total of 291 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 13,432. The total fatality rate was 0.13 per cent.
The country has administered Covid vaccines to 44,934,142 people, or 87.6 per cent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,463,740, or 86.6 per cent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,449,020 people, or 63.2 per cent of the population.
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