Morrison’s Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said it had been widely understood that anyone arriving in Sydney from New Zealand would be free to travel on to other states such as Victoria that had not closed their border to New South Wales.

The limited travel corridor falls far short of the bubble initially envisaged by Morrison. New Zealand isn’t yet reciprocating, and says anyone returning from a trip to Australia must quarantine for 14 days on their return. Indeed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has urged New Zealanders to holiday at home instead.

Australia’s Victoria reports just one new case

Victoria’s capital Melbourne, which has been the epicentre of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak, is in its third month of a stringent lockdown and the premier will update plans to ease restrictions across the state on Sunday.

Victoria state officials have said they would ease restrictions when the average for new daily cases over a two-week window falls below five. On Saturday, the 14-day day rolling case average was 8.1, down from 8.7 in the previous day.

In neighbouring New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, there were seven new cases of Covid-19, five of which locally acquired and most linked to an outbreak at a childcare centre.

Daily infections hit record high in Malaysia

The Southeast Asian country, which has imposed targeted lockdowns this month as infections surged, has had a total of 19,627 infections.

Malaysia also recorded four new deaths, bringing the total number of fatalities to 180.

Singapore at seven-month low

There were 89 active cases in the city state, falling below 100 for the first time since March 12, the Ministry of Health said Friday. Earlier this week, Singapore said it recorded no new local infections for the first time since February, signalling a rebound from an outbreak in migrant worker dormitories that at one stage contributed to more than a thousand infections a day.

Virus cases in Singapore have been kept at low levels through mandatory mask-wearing and other social distancing measures as the economy largely reopened in June.

Singapore has recorded 28 deaths from the pandemic, according to the statement.

Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble seen as risk and remedy

Thailand sees two new local cases

The cases were among two Myanmar nationals living near the border with Myanmar, where infections have been surging recently.

The two were tested on October 13. They showed no symptoms but results were positive, the centre said in the statement.

The last known local case was in early September.

India continues downward trend

According to the Health Ministry, India’s average number of daily cases dropped to 72,576 last week from 92,830 during the week of September 9-15, when the virus peaked. It is recording an average of around 70,000 cases daily so far this month. But some experts say India’s figures may not be reliable because of poor reporting and inadequate health infrastructure. India is also relying heavily on antigen tests, which are faster but less accurate than traditional RT-PCR tests.

Health officials have warned about the potential for the virus to spread during the religious festival season beginning later this month. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan told reporters on Friday that the next two months were particularly crucial because of the winter season and festivals. New Delhi is also bracing for high air pollution levels, making the coronavirus fight more complicated in upcoming months.

Germany sees record high

Germany‘s prior infection peak of around 6,300 daily cases was in late March, but it is likely there were significantly more cases at the time as testing capacity has been greatly expanded since then.

According to the RKI, at least 356,387 people in Germany have been infected with the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, while 9,767 have died, 33 more than the previous day.

Europe and US reel as coronavirus infections surge at record pace

Elsewhere, Russia on Saturday recorded 14,922 new coronavirus cases, pushing the national tally to 1,384,235. Officials also said 279 people had died in the previous 24 hours, taking the official death toll to 24,002.

Ukraine registered a record 6,410 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, the national security council said on Saturday, up from a previous record of 5,992 reported on Friday. The council said 109 patients had died in the past 24 hours, the highest daily toll since the start of the pandemic.

Austria’s foreign minister tests positive

Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg has tested positive for the coronavirus and might have caught it at a meeting with his European Union counterparts on Monday, a spokeswoman for his ministry said on Saturday.

Schallenberg’s infection raises the prospect that the EU Foreign Affairs Council was a so-called super-spreader event. His Belgian counterpart Sophie Wilmes said on Friday she was going into self-isolation with suspected symptoms.

“It is suspected that Schallenberg might have been infected at the Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on Monday,” the spokeswoman said, adding that he did not have symptoms and had been tested as a routine measure.

Schallenberg also attended a cabinet meeting on Wednesday but cabinet members wore face masks, the spokeswoman said. Austria’s cabinet had a scare less than two weeks ago when a close colleague of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s tested positive.

“As a precautionary measure all members of the government will be tested on Saturday,” the spokeswoman said.

Coronavirus death patterns shift in US

The report, released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looks at coronavirus-associated deaths reported between May 1 and August 31. It is an update of an earlier report that focused on deaths during an initial wave of illnesses in the early spring that mainly hit the Northeast.

It found that by August more than three-fifths of the deaths were occurring in Southern states, and more than one-fifth in Western states. It reported a summer surge in deaths among Hispanics, to about 24 per cent of all deaths in August.

It also showed a decline in deaths in nursing homes, to 17 per cent of all deaths in August from 30 per cent in May.

Whites accounted for 51 per cent of the deaths in the late spring and summer, up from around 40 per cent in the early spring. There was a decline in the proportion of deaths of people who were black, to 19 per cent from as many as 25 per cent in the early spring.

World Food Programme warns on starvation

The head of the World Food Programme, this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, says the number of people “marching toward starvation” has jumped from 135 million to 270 million since the Covid-19 pandemic and is again urging billionaires to donate just a few billion to save millions of lives.

Executive Director David Beasley told a virtual UN press conference on Friday that the global wealth of some 2,200 billionaires rose by about US$2 trillion between April and July as the pandemic raged. He was referring to a study by Swiss bank UBS and accounting firm PwC published last week which said the global wealth of billionaires climbed from US$8 trillion at the start of April to US$10.2 trillion in July.

Pandemic puts millions of middle class Southeast Asians at risk of poverty

Beasley said WFP is “greatly concerned about 2021” because budgets were not calculated to take into account the economic fallout from the pandemic. Wealthy countries put US$17 trillion into economic stimulus packages to tackle the coronavirus and its fallout, and “that’s US$17 trillion that isn’t going to be available for 2021”.

This year, he said, many governments reached deeper into their pockets while they could and gave the UN and its agencies more money, but “the governments – they tapped out”.

Beasley said that is why a one-time infusion of cash from the billionaires is so essential for 2021. The humanitarian crises in the world are worsening with Yemen “the worst of the worst of the worst”, Africa’s Sahel region “undoubtedly one of the worst”, Congo “just horrific”, and Syria “deteriorating”. Many other countries are also deteriorating including Nigeria, South Sudan and Ethiopia, he said.

Reporting by Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press, DPA