LISBON, Portugal -- Portugal is getting more help from its European Union partners to ease pressure on hospitals crunched by the pandemic, with France and Luxembourg the latest countries to offer medical workers.

The Portuguese health ministry says France is sending a doctor and three nurses, while Luxembourg is providing two doctors and two nurses.

The health ministry said in a statement late Thursday the medics should arrive next week.

The German army sent eight doctors and 18 nurses earlier this month to help at a Lisbon hospital.

The number of COVID-19 patients in hospital and in intensive care fell Thursday for the third straight day, but Portugal’s seven-day average of daily deaths remained the world’s highest, at 1.97 per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:

Germany reinstates some border controls to fight variants. Dr. Fauci expects coronavirus shot categories to open up by April in U.S. California’s virus death toll surpasses New York. African nations still encouraged to use AstraZeneca vaccine. President Joe Biden's virus-fighting team is on a war strategy to defeat the coronavirus.

— Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia’s second-largest city will begin its third lockdown due to a rapidly spreading COVID-19 cluster centered on hotel quarantine.

The five-day lockdown will be enforced across Victoria state to prevent the virus spreading from the state capital Melbourne, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says.

Only international flights that were already in the air when the lockdown was announced would be allowed to land at Melbourne Airport.

A population of 6.5 million people will be locked down from 11:59 p.m. until the same time on Wednesday because of a contagious British variant of the virus first detected at a Melbourne Airport hotel has infected 13 people.

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MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia is on track to manufacture and administer its own version of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine by the end of March, the health minister said on Friday.

Health Minister Greg Hunt was speaking at biotechnology company CSL Ltd.’s plant in Melbourne where the first doses are nearing completion.

The first of Australia’s 20 million doses of German manufactured Pfizer vaccine is to be administered in late February.

The first of the 1.2 million doses of overseas-made AstraZeneca vaccine is to be available in Australia by early March, although the Australian regulator has yet to approve it.

The government maintains that Australia’s relatively low incidence of COVID-19 does not justify emergency vaccine approvals.

The government expects that everyone among Australia’s population of 26 million who wants to be vaccinated and is over the age of 16 will have access to a vaccine by October.

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand — New Zealand’s first coronavirus vaccine doses are due to arrive in the country next week, with border workers getting inoculated from Feb. 20, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Friday.

New Zealand regulators gave provisional approval for the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech earlier this month.

Ardern says it’s pleasing to get the first doses ahead of Pfizer’s initial schedule, given the pressures on global demand.

New Zealand has no community transmission of the virus and the nation’s 12,000 border workers are considered the most vulnerable to catching and spreading the disease because they interact with arriving travelers, some of whom are infected.

However, New Zealand’s success in stamping out the virus also means it will need to wait longer than many other countries to get vaccine doses for the general population. Officials say they will hope to begin general inoculations in the second half of the year.

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A COVID-19 variant first identified in Southern California appears to have spread to at least 19 states and several other countries, a study published Thursday suggests.

The variant accounted for about 44% of Southern California cases as of late January, nearly double from a month earlier, the study said. It was first identified in a single case in July and reemerged during a holiday surge in cases in the Los Angeles area.

More research is needed to determine if the variant spreads more easily than other COVID-19 variants or causes more disease, said study co-author Jasmine Plummer, a Cedars-Sinai researcher.

The paper was published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, wrote in an accompanying editorial that said new variants likely will continue to emerge until spread of the virus is reduced.

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LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles is temporarily closing five mass vaccination sites including Dodger Stadium for lack of supply as the state faces continuing criticism over the vaccine rollout.

Mayor Eric Garcetti says the city will exhaust its supply of Moderna first doses — two are required for full immunization — forcing it to close drive-through and walk-up vaccination sites Friday and Saturday.

They may not reopen until the city gets more supplies, perhaps next Tuesday or Wednesday. Smaller mobile vaccination clinics will continue operating.

Garcetti says Los Angeles uses about 13,000 doses in a typical day but received only 16,000 this week.

“This is not where I want to be,” Garcetti said. “It’s not where we deserve to be.”

California has now recorded the most confirmed deaths from the coronavirus with 45,496, edging past New York’s toll of 45,312, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Other coronavirus numbers are improving in the state, however.

The seven-day test positivity rate has fallen to 4.8%, and the most recent daily number of confirmed positive cases was 8,390, down from 53,000 in December.

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NEW YORK — U.S. health officials are now recommending that people who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus do not have to go into a 14-day quarantine after exposure to an infected person.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly posted the updated guidance this week. It says vaccinated people may skip quarantine if they are asymptomatic, and if their contact with an infected person came at least two weeks after receipt of the final dose in the two-shot vaccination series and within three months of receipt of that last dose.

The recommendation is similar to what the CDC has said about people who developed immunity after being infected with COVID.

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SAN FRANCISCO — A surge of COVID-19 cases at the University of California, Berkeley, has prompted school officials to extend a lockdown on about 2,000 students in residence halls and bar them from outdoor exercise.

The university says more than 400 mostly undergraduates have tested positive since an outbreak started in mid-January. A weekly breakdown shows about 200 positive tests since the start of February.

A lockdown initially put in place for Feb. 1-8 has been extended through at least mid-month. Among the strict new rules are a ban on outdoor exercise that goes beyond state guidelines encouraging people to get outside to exercise.