S Korea sees 347,554 Covid cases in 24 hrs

Panic-buying at supermarkets in Shanghai due to Covid lockdown

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FE Team | Published: March 29, 2022 21:10:28

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SEOUL, Mar 29 (Xinhua/ AFP): South Korea reported 347,554 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight Monday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 12,350,428, the health authorities said Tuesday.
The daily caseload was sharply up from 187,213 in the previous day due to higher virus tests on weekdays, 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, 66,078 were Seoul residents. The number of newly infected people living in Gyeonggi province and the western port city of Incheon was 88,695 and 18,826 respectively.
The virus spread also raged in the non-metropolitan region. The number of new infections in the non-capital areas was 173,914, or 50.0 percent of the total local transmission.
Among the new cases, 41 were imported from overseas, lifting the total to 31,003. The number of infected people who were in a serious condition stood at 1,215, down 58 from the previous day.
A total of 237 more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 15,423. The total fatality rate was 0.12 percent.
The country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to 44,946,767 people, or 87.6 percent of the total population, and the number of fully inoculated people was 44,478,548, or 86.7 percent of the population. The number of those who received booster jabs was 32,667,018 people, or 63.7 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, Shanghai recorded a steep climb in Covid-19 cases Tuesday as spreading anxiety in the Chinese city of about 25 million prompted panic-buying at supermarkets.
Millions endured a second day of lockdown after authorities effectively split the country's biggest urban area in two, with residents of the city's eastern half confined to their homes for four days and subjected to mandatory testing.
China reported 6,886 domestic Covid cases nationwide on Tuesday, with more than 4,400 of them detected in Shanghai, now the centre of the country's worst Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic.
Images showed some supermarket shelves in the city emptied of all goods.
"After being unable to grab any groceries this morning, I went back to sleep, and all I dreamt about was buying food at the supermarket," one user wrote on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform.
"I'd never have thought that society today would be worried over buying groceries."
In a bid to keep Shanghai's economy running, authorities have avoided the hard lockdowns regularly deployed in other Chinese cities, instead opting for rolling, localised restrictions.
The area locked down on Monday is the sprawling eastern district known as Pudong, which includes the main international airport and glittering financial centre.
The lockdown will last until Friday, then switch to the city's more populated western Puxi section, home to the historic Bund riverfront.
The city's airports, railway stations and international shipping ports remain operational, while key manufacturers are allowed to resume production after a brief halt, state media reported.
China has largely kept virus outbreaks under control over the past two years through strict zero-tolerance measures including mass lockdowns of cities and provinces for even small numbers of cases.
But Omicron has proven harder to stamp out.
At a press briefing on Monday, health expert Wu Fan said it was "necessary to take more resolute measures" to eliminate community transmission.