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Today (25th), the number of new COVID-19 cases is expected to record around 6,000. The number of patients with severe cases is also the highest ever. As many of the elderly have completed the third dose, the number of confirmed cases over the age of 60 is decreasing, but the number of children under the age of 11 who are not vaccinated is rapidly increasing.
Reporter Park Soo-jin.
<Reporter> The
number of seriously ill patients reached 1,000 for four days in a row, breaking the daily high.
Last week, the number of confirmed cases in the 7,000 range for four days in a row is still continuing.
Still, it is the third day of decline since this Wednesday.
The quarantine authorities are expecting the number of severe cases to decrease from next week.
[Lee Ki-il/Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters 1st Controller: The number of patients is now somewhat stagnant. We'll see what happens next week once again.]
Among the confirmed cases, the proportion of those aged 60 and over fell from 35% to 25% in just one month.
Most of all, it seems that the tertiary vaccination rate among the elderly has risen to 67%.
However, the number of confirmed cases under the age of 11, not subject to vaccination, increased rapidly, exceeding 6,000 in one week.
The government has launched a review to vaccinate children under 11 years of age.
[Kim Bu-gyeom / Prime Minister: We can never be vigilant because children's corona fatality rate is low.
(At the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Please review whether children are vaccinated in advance.] The
number of infected with Omicron mutation increased by 16 to 262 in total.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) announced that it has developed a PCR diagnostic reagent that can confirm Omicron infection in up to 3 hours.
In the meantime, it took 3 to 5 days to find out if the person was infected using the genome analysis method.
This reagent will be used in each municipality from the 30th.