SEOUL– South Korea has confirmed 325 more cases of four major contagious variants of the new coronavirus over the past week, including 153 cases of the highly transmissible Delta variant, health authorities said Tuesday.
The caseload of such infections reached 2,817 here, with the number of Delta cases tallied at 416, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
Of the newly confirmed cases over the cited period, there were 205 local infections and 120 imported cases.
Of them, 168 cases were the Britain-originated variant, followed by 153 from India and four from Brazil, according to the KDCA.
Out of 3,644 South Korean nationals who have entered the country from India since early May, 82 were confirmed to have been infected with the new coronavirus, the KDCA said.
Of them, 22 were infected with the Delta variant, according to the authorities.
Health authorities said the country will witness more cases of the highly transmissible Delta variant down the road.
The KDCA expected the Delta variant to account for 90 percent of the new COVID-19 cases in Europe and the United States by the end of August.
The authorities earlier cited various reports that showed the Delta variant is between 40 and 60 percent more contagious than the Alpha variant that was first identified in Britain.
The rate of variant COVID-19 cases detected through a gene analysis came to 50.1 percent over the past one week, sharply up from 37.1 percent a week earlier, the KDCA said.
The steady rise in variant cases poses a threat to the country’s virus battle currently dogged by a spike in new cases and its inoculation campaign.
The country is at risk of experiencing another round of the pandemic, with the wider Seoul area reporting more than 80 percent of its daily caseload.
On Tuesday, the country’s daily new virus cases stayed in the 700s for the fourth day in a row.
A total of 15.4 million people, or 30 percent of the country’s population, have received their first shots of COVID-19 vaccines. The KDCA said 5.32 million people have been fully vaccinated, accounting for 10.5 percent of the population.
To block the inflow of the new emerging strain from India, entrants from the country are mandatorily quarantined at state facilities for seven days before being put under self-quarantine depending on the results of virus tests.
Source: Yonhap News Agency