A two-week pandemic lockdown in Australia's biggest city of Sydney will be extended for another week in an attempt to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant, local media said Wednesday.
Current stay-at-home orders will remain in effect in Greater Sydney until midnight of July 16, New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters Wednesday.
In China, health officials in the southwestern province of Yunnan locked down the city of Ruili Wednesday, shutting most business establishments and requiring people to stay at home, as a new Covid-19 outbreak expanded.
Ruili, which borders Myanmar, reported 15 new local transmission of the virus Tuesday.
In Thailand, a man from the United Arab Emirates who visited the holiday island of Phuket during a tour group Tuesday was found to be infected with the disease, Governor Narong Woonciew said Wednesday.
The man is the first foreign tourist found with the virus since the Phuket was reopened July 1 under Thailand's Sandbox Program, the governor said.
In the Philippines, the country has reached the 12 million mark in administering doses as of Tuesday, National Task Force Against Covid-19 representative Vivencio Dizon said.
"So this is really proof that we continue to ramp up our vaccine rollout," the Philippines News Agency quoted him as saying.
Over in Singapore, the country is not counting people who were given Sinovac's CoronaVac vaccine in its nationwide tally, according to the Ministry of Health.
Almost 2.2 million people have officially completed their immunization regimen, and 3.6 million have received at least one shot of Pfizer or Moderna treatments, health authorities said.
In Indonesia, more than 30,000 new infections were reported while more than 700 people died.
The country's deaths are now more than 60,000 and there are growing concerns about the effect of the virus not only on pregnant women but babies and children, Al Jazeera said.
In Vietnam, health officials recorded 276 local cases Wednesday morning, and 270 are in the capital, Ho Chi Minh City.
Vietnam has inoculated more than 3.91 million people against the virus and 235,570 of them have received two doses, VNExpress reported.
Over in India, the government denounced huge crowds at popular northern tourist spots, saying such "gross violations" of pandemic health protocols could trigger a new surge in cases.
"The virus is still between us...one mistake can give the virus a chance to spread among us," Agence France-Presse quoted senior health ministry official Lav Agarwal as saying.
Worldwide, there are 185 million cases of the virus, with 3.99 deaths.
