CANBERRA:  Australia recorded its highest number of new Covid-19 cases in recent months on Wednesday when half of the country’s capital cities were under lockdown to battle a third wave of coronavirus infections.

There were 679 new cases of Covid-19 reported nationwide on Wednesday morning.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the country was ‘in a tunnel’ but vaccines were ‘rays of light’ after a record 273,000 people were vaccinated on Tuesday.

“One in two Australians have had their first dose. That’s what we’re achieving and 40 percent over the age of 50 have been fully vaccinated,” he said in a press conference in Canberra.

“We are going down that tunnel, and every vaccination shines light for Australians to see, and I want to thank those 273,000 Australians yesterday to create those rays of light, those rays of hope.”

Among the cases reported on Wednesday, 633 were in New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state with Sydney as the capital city, 24 in Victoria and 22 in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

The Northern Territory (NT), which is partially also in lockdown, reported zero new cases for the second consecutive day. And Darwin was the fourth capital city of Australia’s eight states and territories currently locked-down, with residents of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra already subject to strict stay-at-home restrictions.

The ACT’s 22 new cases was a recent-high, bringing the total number of cases linked to an outbreak in Canberra to 67.

As of Tuesday afternoon, there had been 40,097 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia, and the number of locally acquired cases in the previous 24 hours was 486, according to the latest figures updated on Tuesday evening from the Department of Health.  (Xinhua)