Asia Today: New restrictions coming for Australian hot spot

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australia’s hot spot Victoria state on Tuesday reported 374 new cases of COVID-19, its second-highest daily tally.

Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews also announced three more deaths, bringing the national death toll 126.

Andrews said a lockdown in Australia’s second-largest city Melbourne, which began two weeks ago, was having an impact.

“You’d like to see numbers coming down. At the end of the day though, we’re not seeing the doubling and doubling again” of cases, Andrews said. “So what that says to me ... is that the sorts of measures we’ve put in place are having a direct impact.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said military personnel were helping Victorian health authorities deal with the growing caseload.

“We’re still very much in the hard part of this fight, as you can see from the daily case numbers and I’m not expecting that to change a lot in the short term,” Morrison said. “And we just need to keep working the problem.”

Tighter regulations will come into force on the Victoria-New South Wales border on Wednesday that will only allow border communities to cross for essential work, health and education reasons.

Face masks will become compulsory from Thursday for residents in lockdown regions when they leave their homes.

In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:

— Numbers of new cases in China’s latest coronavirus outbreak fell on Tuesday, with just eight reported in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Another three cases were brought from outside the country, according to the National Health Commission, bringing China’s total to 83,693 with 4,634 deaths. Xinjiang cases have been concentrated in the regional capital and largest city of Urumqi, where around 50 people and possibly...