That’s it for me for now. I’m handing you over to my colleague in the UK, Josh Halliday.

India has carried out nearly 900,000 coronavirus tests in a single day, a record for the country, as it fights a surge of Covid-19 cases. It comes as the South Korean cluster linked to church in northern Seoul grew to 400 cases.

India’s health ministry said a record 899,000 tests were conducted in the 24 hours to Tuesday. Only the US has ever carried out more daily tests, conducting 926,876, on 24 July.

India’s tests returned 55,079 cases positive cases, taking its total tally to more than 2.7 million – behind only the US and Brazil. The daily death toll of 876, took total fatalities in the country to 51,797.

The ministry said that even with such a high rate of testing, “the positivity has remained low”, currently 8.81% compared with the weekly national average of 8.84%. The US has a 9% test positivity rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

You can get up to speed on this and on all the day’s other top stories in our global report below:

New Zealand, prime minister, Jacinda Ardern hit back on Tuesday against Donald Trump for saying her country is experiencing a “big surge” in Covid-19, calling the remarks “patently wrong”.

Trump sparked uproar in New Zealand when he told a crowd in Minnesota that the country of 5 million people was in the grip of a “terrible” upsurge in COVID-19 cases, having earlier succeeded in eliminating the disease.

Thirteen new infections were confirmed in New Zealand on Tuesday, taking the country’s total number of cases since the pandemic began to 1,293, with 22 deaths. This compares with the U.S. tally of more than 5.2 million cases and 170,000 deaths.

“Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible. We don’t want that,” Trump said.

Ardern said there was no comparison between New Zealand’s handful of new cases a day and the “tens of thousands” reported in the United States.

“I think anyone who’s following Covid and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world,” she told reporters.

“Obviously it’s patently wrong,” she said of Trump’s comments.

“We are still one of the best-performing countries in the world when it comes to COVID … our workers are focused on keeping it that way.”

New Zealand’s death rate per 100,000 people, at about 0.44, is one of the lowest in the world thanks to strict lockdowns enforced early in the pandemic. The United States has a death rate of 5.21 per 100,000, one of the highest in the world.

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he would be among the first to receive a Russian coronavirus vaccine if it is shown to be effective.

Russia’s announcement last week that it was the first in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine was met with caution from Western scientists who said it still needed to be proved safe and effective.

“I would be the first to get vaccinated, because it matters a lot to me, but we have to … ensure that it’s something effective and that it’s available to everyone,” Lopez Obrador said at his daily news conference.

The Mexican leader added that he would personally reach out to Russia or China if they are first to develop an effective vaccine.

“In this important matter, there should be no ideologies… health comes first,” he said.

The Latin American country has recorded more than 56,000 coronavirus deaths – the world’s third-highest toll – and over half a million infections.

Mexico announced a deal last week with British-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca to manufacture its vaccine now under development if clinical trials show it to be effective.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 1,390 to 225,404, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Tuesday.

The reported death toll rose by four to 9,236, the tally showed.

More than 400 coronavirus cases have been identified in relation to a church in northern Seoul as of Tuesday, the news agency Yonhap reports.

“After a member of Sarang Jeil Church first tested positive on 12 August, 123 more were identified on Monday, raising the number of cases to 438, which includes 282 in Seoul,” Park Yu-mi, the capital city government’s director of public health, told a press briefing.

There are fears that this growing outbreak could escalate, with nearly 1,000 cases identified in the past five days.

Yonhap says the Sarang Jeil cluster is now South Korea’s second biggest after the Shincheonji religious group, where 5,214 were infected. Most of the Shincheonji cases broke out in the southeastern city of Daegu.

Half of the Sarang Jeil’s 4,000 members has so far been tested, with 16% returning positive results, Yohnap says.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reports that the city has banned flights from India, due to rising Covid cases.

Footage from the Agence France-Presse agency of crowds gathering in Wuhan – the centre of the pandemic outbreak in China – over the weekend. The images speak for itself.

Nigeria will resume international flights on 29 August as it eases restrictions over the novel coronavirus pandemic, the country’s aviation minister said Monday.

Africa’s most populous country shut its airspace in March to contain the spread of the virus that has so far infected 49,068 and claimed 975 lives.

“Glad to announce the resumption of international flights from August 29, 2020, beginning with Lagos and Abuja as we did with the domestic flight resumption,” Hadi Sirika said on Twitter, referring to the nation’s commercial hub and its administrative capital.

“Protocols and procedures will be announced in due course,” he said, adding that the country’s other international airports would follow suit.

The decision came barely six weeks after the West African economic powerhouse resumed domestic flights.

The world-famous Mariinsky ballet company has called off performances after some 30 members, mostly dancers, contracted the coronavirus, St Petersburg health authorities said on Monday.

Three have been hospitalised while the others are following treatments at home, Irina Chinjeria of the city’s health authority said, quoted by the Interfax news agency.

Nearly 300 other dancers have been told to confine themselves to home as a precaution.

Performances scheduled for last week were called off and only operas will be staged for the rest of August.

As of Monday, Russia had recorded 927,745 cases of Covid-19, and 15,740 deaths, according to official figures.

China has reported 22 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, same as the tally a day earlier, the health authority said.

All of the new infections were imported cases, the National Health Commission said in a statement, making it the second straight day for zero new locally transmitted cases. There were no new deaths.

China also reported 17 new asymptomatic patients, compared with 37 a day earlier.
As of August 17, mainland China had a total of 84,871 confirmed coronavirus cases, it said. China’s death toll from the coronavirus remained unchanged at 4,634.

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, has begun speaking. He confirms 222 new cases today and 17 deaths. Thirteen of the 17 are related to aged care.

He asks people to get tested as soon as symptoms become apparent.

What we are all trying to avoid here is that case numbers come down to the point where we start to think about opening up … only to be unable to do that because the test numbers are too low for us to have clarity about just how much virus is out there.

You can follow all our coverage of this story on our Australian live blog below:

We are expecting another news conference shortly, this time from the Australian premier of the state of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, which has been fighting a major outbreak of coronavirus.

We know that today there have been 222 cases recorded in the state – the lowest number for a month – and 17 deaths. The seven-day average of cases is now down to 307.

We’ll bring you news from that press conference as soon as it starts.