Asia Today: Australian virus hot spot moves to add sick beds

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australia’s coronavirus hot spot Victoria state moved to increase its available hospital beds Thursday and reported a record daily high of 317 infections.

The government had planned to restore hospitals to normal medical services by the end of July before infections began to rise in recent weeks.

Instead, the Victoria government responded to the latest spike by reducing numbers of non-urgent surgeries allowed in hospitals to increase beds available for COVID-19 patients, Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said.

Two men in their 80s died in Victoria in the last 24 hours, bringing the national death toll during the pandemic to 113.

Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said a six-week lockdown in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, was only a week old, so its full impact was not yet apparent.

“It will take some time to bring that stability to the numbers and then of course to start to see a pattern where they are driven down,” Andrews said.

Australia's highest daily tally before Thursday was 288 in Victoria on July 10, both exceeding the previous record of 212 in New South Wales state at the first peak of the pandemic.

“It’s a big number. It needs to turn around," Victoria Chief Health Office Brett Sutton said of 317 new cases. “In some ways, I expect it to turn around this week. But as I’ve always said: it’s no guarantee. It’s upon all of us to be able to turn this number around."

Given the week the lockdown has been in effect, the incubation period of the virus and the time for cases to be confirmed and counted, “we would really expect a plateauing in the next couple of days,” Sutton said. “But we cannot be complacent and expect that’s going to happen automatically.”

New South Wales, the only other state...