SEOUL, Feb. 1 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's daily number of COVID-19 cases hit a new record high, surpassing 18,000 amid spread of the Omicron variant of the virus, the health authorities said Tuesday.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the country recorded 18,343 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 864,042.
The daily caseload was up from 17,079 in the previous day, hovering above 10,000 for seven 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 here.
Of the new cases, 4,103 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 5,509 and 1,366, respectively.
The virus also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 7,145, or 39.4 percent of the total local transmissions.
Among the new cases, 220 were imported from overseas, lifting the total tally for this category to 25,516.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 272, down by 5 from the previous day.
Seventeen more deaths were confirmed from the pandemic, bringing the death toll to 6,772. The total fatality rate was 0.78 percent.
The Asian country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,641,142 people, or 87.0 percent of the total population, and the number of the fully vaccinated people was 43,996,241, or 85.7 percent of the population.
The number of those who received booster jabs was 27,254,256, or 53.1 percent of the population. ■
