COVID-19 cases

There were also two new cases in managed isolation.

There was no media conference today. In a written statement, the Health Ministry said 10 of the new community cases were clearly epidemiologically linked to the Auckland cluster.

It said six cases were linked to the Mt Roskill Evangelical Church, including four within the same household and two who attended church services.

Four other cases are contacts of previously reported confirmed cases.

Nearly 200 staff and students have been infected in the greater Seoul area over the past two weeks.

Remote learning will continue until 11 September, the Ministry of Education said.

Health authorities have warned that the country is on the brink of a nationwide outbreak.

All students in the greater Seoul area, home to over 25 million people, will now take classes online with the exception of those in their final year of high school who are due to take university entrance examinations in December.

The latest fatalities take the state's Covid-19 death toll to 438.

Yesterday's total of 116 new cases was the state's lowest in more than seven weeks .

It followed 209 new cases on Sunday and 182 on Saturday.

Premier Daniel Andrews is expected to give his regular daily update with details about the new cases later today.

Yesterday, he announced his Government would seek to change laws so that Victoria's state of emergency could be extended by another 12 months.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said one of the confirmed cases is an imported case that was picked up at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in Auckland.

The case is a woman in her 30s and it was picked up on day 12 of testing.

The other eight cases are in the community and all epidemiologically linked with the main cluster. Among them, one is linked via travel on a bus, one at a church and two in a workplace.

There are now 1332 confirmed cases, with 351 probable cases in total.

Nineteen of the active cases are imported.

Irish Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said: "We are at a tipping point."

He added that a few weeks ago there were just 61 new reported cases for a seven day period but last week there were 533 cases.

The tightening of restrictions comes ahead of the reopening of schools over the next two weeks.

Taoiseach (Irish PM) Mícheál Martin said that if the current rates of COVID-19 continue to rise "it will be impossible to stop the spread of the virus to our most vulnerable and our most compromised".

Premier Daniel Andrews said 671 new coronavirus cases had been detected since yesterday and seven more people had died.

Six of the deaths have a connection to aged care.

Andrews said there was an "unacceptably high" number of community transmission cases, and the state had 760 active "mystery" COVID-19 infections where the source of the transmission was not known.

"Those mysteries, that community transmission, is in many respects our biggest challenge and the reason why we need to move to a different set of rules," he said.

James Marape's announcement takes the total number of cases confirmed in PNG so far to 27, over half of them having emerged in the past week.

Most of the new cases are health workers at Port Moresby General Hospital where all non-essential services have now been suspended.

This week, a terminally ill patient with advanced cancer who died at the hospital was found by a post-mortem examination to have had the coronavirus.

Earlier the government announced a cluster outbreak at the Central Public Health Laboratory on the hospital premises.

There are about 30,000 Pacific islanders in Utah, and there has so far been about 1,200 cases and 13 deaths from the coronavirus among them.

Jake Fitisemanu, of the Utah Pacific Islander Health Coalition, said his organisation had been working hard to get the community to make use of available resources.

He said it had been working with the media, churches, and Pasifika officials in the governor's office.

US deaths are also rising and have recently reached the highest levels since early June, led by Arizona, California, Florida and Texas, according to the tally.

More than half of all states - 30 out of 50 - have reported record one-day increases in cases this month. Infections are rising in almost all states, based on a Reuters analysis of cases the past two weeks compared with the prior two weeks.

If Florida were a country, it would rank fourth in the world for the most new cases in a day behind the United States, Brazil and India, according to a Reuters analysis.

The state is home to the largest Pacific Island community on the United States mainland - it is made up mostly of Polynesians but also includes a significant number of Micronesians.

As of the middle of this week there have been 1248 Pacific Islanders in Utah reported as affected by the virus, a rate 2.5 times higher than the state average.

Of those cases, 170 have come in the past week with 20 people hospitalised. Thirteen Pacific Islanders have died of COVID-19 in Utah to date.