Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said on Wednesday that the nation will see a turning point in one or two weeks regarding the prospect of overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic.

Presiding over a meeting of the Central Disaster Safety and Countermeasures Headquarters, Kim said he is certain that the government will be able to speed up case mitigation and minimize deaths by withstanding the ongoing difficult periods through the execution of planned measures.

He said the government will do its best to minimize the number of critical cases and deaths while looking beyond the time when this latest wave reaches its peak.

The prime minister also mentioned a growing dominance of the variant, BA.2, which now accounts for over 40 percent of the new cases in the nation.

However, he said the variant is little different from omicron in terms of severity, albeit being even more contagious, stressing that the authorities are capable of coping with the new strain with existing quarantine regimes.