Still unexplained
The hunt for the origins of Covid-19 has for the past four years been a tangled web of politics, power struggles, and international finger-pointing.
South Korea reported 125,846 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Thursday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 16,104,869, the health authorities said Friday.
The daily caseload was down from 148,443 in the previous day and far lower than 205,312 a week earlier, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA). The health authorities believed that the daily caseload has been on the decline after the resurgence, driven by the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant and its subvariant BA.2, peaked in mid-March.
Of the new cases, 21,450 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 32,584 and 6,690 respectively.
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The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 65,108, or 51.7 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 14 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 31,538.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 999, up 37 from the previous day.
A total of 264 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 20,616. The total fatality rate was 0.13 percent.
The number of people who received two doses of COVID-19 vaccines was 44,521,723, or 86.8 percent of the total population, and the figure for those getting booster jabs was 32,974,504 people, or 64.3 percent of the population.
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