SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea reported 185,566 new Covid-19 cases as of midnight Friday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 15,169,189, the health authorities said Saturday.

The daily caseload was down from 205,333 in the previous day, hovering below 300,000 for the fifth consecutive day, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
The spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant and its subvariant BA.2 drove the recent resurgence, especially in the Seoul metropolitan area.
Of the new cases, 32,320 were Seoul residents. The number of the newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 48,198 and 9,759 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 95,249, or 51.3 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 40 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 31,371.
The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,099, up six from the previous day.
A total of 338 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 19,092. The total fatality rate was 0.13 percent.
The number of people who received two doses of Covid-19 vaccines was 44,513,034, or 86.7 percent of the total population, and the figure for those getting booster jabs was 32,909,970 people, or 64.1 percent of the population.