SEOUL : South Korea reported 198,803 new Covid-19 cases as of midnight Wednesday (March 2) compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 3,691,488, the health authorities said Thursday.

The daily caseload was down from a record high of 219,240 the previous day, but it stayed high around 200,000, 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.

Of the new cases, 43,675 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 51,941 and 15,964 respectively.

The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 87,169, or 43.9 percent of the total local transmission.

Among the new cases, 54 were imported, lifting the total to 29,497.

The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 766, up four from the previous day.

A total of 128 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 8,394. The total fatality rate was 0.23 percent.

The country has administered Covid-19 vaccines to 44,863,511 people, or 87.4 per cent of the total population, and the number of the fully inoculated people was 44,375,275, or 86.5 per cent of the population.

The number of those who received booster jabs was 31,575,385 people, or 61.5 per cent of the population.

  - Xinhua