Australia's largest city Sydney will remain in lockdown for another month.
The New South Wales state government announced that the lockdown of the city of five million would last at least until August 28, after reporting on Wednesday 177 new infections in the latest 24-hour period.
It was the largest daily tally since the cluster was discovered in mid-June.
"I am as upset and frustrated as all of you that we were not able to get the case numbers we would have liked at this point in time but that is the reality," New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters.
More than 2,500 people have been infected in a cluster that began when a limousine driver tested positive on June 16 to the contagious Delta variant.
The driver had been infected by a US aircrew he transported from Sydney airport.
The death toll from the cluster reached 11 on Wednesday with a woman in her 90s dying in a Sydney hospital.
Meanwhile, South Korea is reporting a new daily high for coronavirus cases a day after authorities enforced stringent restrictions in areas outside the Seoul capital region seeking to slow a nationwide spread of infections.
The 1,896 cases announced on Wednesday took the country's total for the pandemic to 193,427, with 2,083 deaths from Covid-19.
It was the highest daily jump since the pandemic began and surpassed a previous record of 1,842 announced last Thursday.
The Seoul area has been at the centre of the outbreak.
On Tuesday, the government put much of the non-Seoul regions under the second highest distancing guidelines to guard against a nationwide viral spread.
In eastern China, drivers seeking to leave Jiangsu province will have to show a negative coronavirus test taken in the last 48 hours or be forced to turn around, as infections in the province continue to rise.
The provincial transport department said on Wednesday that 93 checkpoints have been set up on roads in the province, whose capital of Nanjing is the epicentre of China's latest outbreak.
Drivers must remain in their vehicles and wear masks while health workers carry out the checks.
The National Health Commission reported 48 new cases in Jiangsu over the previous 24 hours, bringing its total to 154 over recent days. Authorities say the illnesses are being caused by the highly contagious Delta variant.
The coronavirus continues to spread despite China having administered more than 1.5 billion doses of vaccine. While that amount exceeds the entire Chinese population of 1.4 billion, it is not clear how many have received one dose or both.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here