South Korea's daily number of COVID-19 cases hit a new record high, surpassing 22,000 for the first time amid the spread of the Omicron variant, the health authorities said Thursday.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country reported 22,907 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 907,214.
The daily caseload was up from 20,269 in the previous day, hovering above 20,000 for two straight days.
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 here.
Of the new cases, 5,191 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 6,532 and 1,533 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 9,517, or 41.8 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 134 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 25,808.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 274, down four from the previous day.
Twenty-five more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 6,812. The total fatality rate was 0.75 percent.
The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,641,667 people, or 87.0 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 43,997,129, or 85.7 percent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 27,267,684 people or 53.1 percent of the population.
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