South Korea’s health authorities say they do not expect a letup in the current wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to come soon. 

Kwon Jun-wook, the deputy commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency(KDCA), said on Friday that the fourth wave is overriding all the previous waves in scale and will take longer than the others in reaching its peak. 

The third wave, he explained, had peaked about six to seven weeks in with slightly over one-thousand cases a day, which was seven to eight times larger than its trough in daily caseload. 

Kwon said that in the current wave, on the other hand, daily cases began to spike on June 20, but that the virus reproduction rates for both the capital region and the non-capital regions have been up and down.