Despite lingering vaccine hesitancy among some people, the rate of adverse reaction reports after vaccination stands at a mere 0.35 percent, with most of them complaining of minor symptoms, health officials said Tuesday.
According to the Corona 19 Vaccination Response Promotion Team, as of midnight Saturday, 34,135 adverse reactions were reported after vaccination, accounting for 0.35 percent of the total vaccinations. Of them, 32,355 cases, or 94.8 percent, were mild post-vaccination symptoms such as muscle pain and headache.
However, 1,780 were severe cases, including 208 deaths and 256anaphylaxis cases.
Women reported nearly twice as many adverse reactions as men.
By age, 18-29 years old had the highest rate of adverse cases with 1.9 percent, while those aged 75 and over had the lowest rate with 0.17 percent. Seventy-two deaths were tied to AstraZeneca vaccines (1.30 per 100,000 cases), and 136 deaths were linked to Pfizer vaccines (3.15 per 100,000 cases).
"The relatively higher number of death among Pfizer vaccine recipients was because they were older adults staying at nursing homes," a quarantine official said.
Korea has vaccinated 8,455,799 people – 5,701,559 with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 2,754,240 with Pfizer's vaccine – with the first shot of the vaccine up 875,498 from the previous day. The figure accounts for 16.5 percent of the country's population.
The government noted that the figure on Tuesday marked the highest number of injections per day since the government started its vaccination program on Feb. 26.
From Monday, the country started to inoculate people aged 60-64 with the AstraZeneca vaccine, while military soldiers under age 30 received the Pfizer vaccine.
The country will begin administering Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine supplied by the U.S. government to reservists, civil defense members, and others in charge of defense and foreign affairs starting Thursday.
With the daily tally remaining under the 500-person range for the second consecutive day, health authorities are set to decide whether to extend the current distancing guidelines on Friday.
Currently, the greater Seoul area is under the Level 2 distancing in the five-level scheme, while the rest of the country is under Level 1.5.
As the government has decided to reorganize the social distancing plan from July, it is highly likely to maintain the current stage of distancing and the ban on private gatherings of five people or more until the end of this month.
On Monday, Korea confirmed 454 new cases, including 435 local infections, raising the cumulative caseload to 145,091.
One more person died of Covid-19, raising the death toll to 1,975 with a fatality rate of 1.36 percent. A total of 135,412 people have returned to their daily life after full recovery, up 551 from the previous day. The country's total test number has surpassed 10 million, accounting for about a fifth of the country's population. It has carried out 10,008,584 tests since Jan. 3 last year.