South Korea added nearly 500,000 daily COVID-19 cases during the 24 hours of Tuesday, pushing the country’s accumulated figure over the 10 million mark.

According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, the country’s daily COVID-19 cases reached 490,881, the second-highest daily tally, after 621,205 cases reported Thursday last week.

The country’s accumulated caseload surpassed 10,427,247, which accounts for around 20 percent of the country’s total population of 51 million.

South Korea has suffered more than 9.5 million new cases this year alone, a stark contrast with the 630,821 cases reported between 2020 and 2021.

The government previously estimated that the country will see decreases in the number of daily COVID-10 cases starting Wednesday.

However, the “stealth omicron” variant, BA.2, which is thought to be 30 percent more transmissible than the original omicron variant, has been spreading rapidly, prolonging the omicron wave.

Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum pointed out that patients infected with the stealth omicron variant accounted for some 40 percent of the total COVID-19 patients, during a COVID-19 response meeting Wednesday.

But Kim stressed that the country can still manage the spread of the stealth omicron variant, with saying that the stealth subvariant of the omicron strain will not correlate to sudden spikes in hospitalizations or deaths.

Kim added the government will continue to focus on minimizing the number of COVID-19 related deaths and critically ill patients, which are expected to continue to remain high in the following one or two weeks.

On Tuesday, the country added 291 COVID-19 deaths, down from the previous day’s 384. The death toll from COVID-19 reached 13,432, and the fatality rate stood at 0.13 percent.

The number of critically ill patients has remained over 1,000 for 16 days straight. As of midnight Tuesday, the severe cases reached 1,084 on Tuesday, down 20 from the previous day.

As the number of severe cases and COVID-19 deaths remain high, the government is speeding up the procurement of antiviral medicines for COVID-19.

South Korea said earlier that it will introduce Merck’s oral antiviral medicine Lagevrio for 100,000 patients this week, amid the ongoing shortage of antiviral treatments.

The country currently has around 70,000 doses of Pfizer’s oral COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid, but the treatment is quickly running out as the number of severe cases remained higher than expected.

Jung Ki-suck, director of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital and the head of a COVID-19 response team within the presidential transition committee, also emphasized the importance of procuring antiviral treatments from the US or European countries.

Jung also mentioned that the country should look into possibilities of local development of a biosimilar of an antiviral medicine for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, South Korea is expected to discard hundreds of thousands of doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of this month, due to lower-than-expected demand.