Australia’s largest city, Sydney, will remain closed for another month.
The New South Wales state government announced that the lockdown in the city of five million would last until at least August 28, after reporting 177 new infections in the past 24 hours on Wednesday.
It was the largest number of days since the cluster was discovered in mid-June.
A jogger walks past the Sydney Opera House at dawn (Mick Tsikas / AAP Image via AP)
“I’m as upset and frustrated as all of you that we couldn’t get the number of cases we wanted at this point, but that’s the reality,” New South Wales Prime Minister Gladys Berejiklian told reporters.
More than 2,500 people have become infected in a cluster that began when a limo driver tested positive for the contagious Delta variant on June 16.
The driver was infected by a US flight crew that he had transported from Sydney Airport.
The cluster death toll reached 11 on Wednesday, with one woman dying in a Sydney hospital in her 90s.
Meanwhile, South Korea is reporting a new daily high for coronavirus cases a day after enforcing strict restrictions in areas outside the Seoul capital area to help slow the spread of infections across the country.
The 1,896 cases announced on Wednesday brought the country’s total for the pandemic to 193,427 with 2,083 deaths from Covid-19.
South Korea reported a new daily high for coronavirus cases (Ahn Young-joon / AP)
It was the highest daily jump since the pandemic began, beating an earlier record of 1,842 announced last Thursday.
The Seoul region was at the center of the outbreak.
On Tuesday, the government put much of the non-Seoul regions under the second highest distancing guidelines to prevent the virus from spreading nationwide.
In east China, drivers trying to leave Jiangsu Province must have a negative coronavirus test done in the past 48 hours or be forced to turn back as infections continue to rise in the province.
The provincial transport ministry said Wednesday that 93 checkpoints have been set up on roads in the province, whose capital, Nanjing, is the epicenter of the recent outbreak in China.
Drivers must stay in their vehicles and wear masks while health workers do the checks.
The National Health Commission reported 48 new cases in Jiangsu in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 154 in the past few days. According to authorities, the diseases are caused by the highly contagious Delta variant.
Temporary test labs in a sports stadium in Nanjing, China (Li Bo / Xinhua via AP)
The coronavirus continues to spread despite China having given more than 1.5 billion doses of vaccine. While that amount exceeds the total Chinese population of 1.4 billion, it is not clear how many received a dose or both.
And as a major breakthrough for one of the last countries in the world to adopt Covid-19 vaccines, Tanzania’s president launched the country’s vaccination campaign on Wednesday by publicly receiving a stab and asking others to do the same.
The government of the East African country under former President John Magufuli had long worried African health authorities by denying the pandemic.
Mr Magufuli, who insisted that the coronavirus could be defeated with prayer, died in March. The presidency went to his deputy Samia Suluhu Hassan, who has since changed Tanzania’s course on Covid-19.
According to the World Health Organization, the number of deaths from coronavirus has increased by 21% globally in the past week.
Most of the 69,000 deaths were reported in America and Southeast Asia.
The UN health agency also found that Covid-19 cases have increased by 8% worldwide and there are now almost 194 million infections.
The WHO said that “if these trends continue, the cumulative number of globally reported cases could exceed 200 million in the next two weeks”.