Amid the rising reinfections of Covid-19, the quarantine authorities on Thursday recommended a booster shot to people who have previously tested positive for the virus.
The Corona 19 Vaccination Response Promotion Team has changed the vaccination regulation to recommend a booster shot for high-risk groups aged 12-17 years and all adults 18 years and older who the virus has infected to receive the booster shots three months after the diagnosis.
Korea had recommended that people with a history of infection finish receiving their first two shots, leaving third or fourth shots to their decisions.
Quarantine authorities stressed that they changed the regulations due to a recent analysis of infected people, which showed that the risk of reinfection and death after infection is lower as the number of vaccinations increases.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) analyzed the vaccination history and risk of death of the 17,781,756 people who once tested positive for the virus and 84,646 people who tested positive for the virus twice from Jan. 2020 to July 16.
It set the risk ratio of reinfection in the unvaccinated group at 1, and the risk ratio of those who completed the first vaccination was 0.99. The comparable figures for those who completed the second and third vaccination were 0.52 and 0.26.
The risk of progression to death also decreased as the number of vaccinations increased.
Health officials stressed that foreign studies have also confirmed similar results, with previously infected people who have received a booster shot having a 20 percent higher chance of preventing infection than the unvaccinated or those who have only completed their primary vaccination.
On Thursday, the KDCA confirmed 178,574 new virus cases raising the cumulative caseload to 21,861,296. It marked a slight fall from the previous day when the figure hit a four-month high of 180,803 but was 1.3 times larger than a week earlier.
Imported cases reached an all-time high of 633, passing the previous record of 615 last week.
Health officials have recently chalked up the recent increase in cases to the growth in the number of people traveling overseas during the summer vacation season.
An additional 61 people died of Covid-19, lifting the death toll to 25,813, with a fatality rate of 0.12 percent. The number of critically ill patients came to 470.
According to the quarantine authorities, multiple research teams have predicted that this epidemic's highest number of severe cases per day will occur at 830 to 920, and the death toll will peak at about 100 to 140 per day at the beginning of next month.
According to the agency, about 44.65 million among 52 million Koreans have been fully vaccinated. In addition, about 33.51 million people had received their first booster shots, and 6.7 million had their second booster shots.
As of the first week of August, Korea reported around 14,000 infections per 1 million people, far higher than that of other major nations. The figure for the United States came to 2,000, and that for Japan stood at 11,000.
However, the death toll in Korea was far below that of the U.S., Japan, and Singapore, the KDCA said, vowing continued efforts to prevent serious cases and deaths.