Victoria "remains in a precarious position" on its first day of a snap lockdown as six new coronavirus cases are recorded, including a student at specialist school with vulnerable children.

Health Minister Martin Foley warned the Victoria's coronavirus situation was still unstable as he confirmed the new local COVID-19 cases today.

A student at Warringa Park School and a household contact has been diagnosed with the virus and is among three cases linked to the City of Maribyrnong.

LIVE UPDATES: Queensland border tightens with Victoria

The third is a cleaner at Epworth Hospital who worked in an administration area after hours but was not in contact with patients.

Three are linked to Hobsons Bay community outbreak – two of whom were reported yesterday.

Mr Foley said Victorians should not to be complacent as its sixth COVID-19 lockdown gets underway.

"Victoria remains in a precarious situation," he said.

READ MORE: Officer injured in Melbourne anti-lockdown protests as 15 arrested

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The Delta variant was presenting a fresh challenge to health authorities due to the speed of spread and its highly infectious nature.

There are now 72 active cases of COVID-19 in Victoria, the "majority" of which are from the previous community outbreak, Victoria's COVID Response Commander Jeroen Weimar said.

He warned that health authorities expect exposure sites start to spread across wider Melbourne and potentially regional Victoria, given the latest positive cases.

Mr Weimar said contact tracers are no closer to determining how the first Maribyrnong case contracted COVID-19.

He noted that authorities were looking into the direction of transmission between that case and their positive close contacts.

Both of Victoria's current clusters have been confirmed as the Delta variant, but the exact strains have not yet been determined.

Mr Weimar said there was "no obvious link" between the latest clusters and the traffic controller who earlier caught the virus.

Mr Weimar urged more people to come out and get tested.

"We've expanded operating hours at 13 of our testing sites," he said.

He urged people not to be deterred by long queues in the morning to try returning in the afternoon, when queues were generally shorter.

There have now been 1.78 million people vaccinated through Victoria's state-run clinics.

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Victoria requests 'very forcefully' to bring forward Pfizer doses

Victorian authorities have "made their case very forcefully" to the Commonwealth Government to have its Pfizer dose allocations brought forward, Mr Foley said.

He said the request had been made due to the latest outbreak and to service "huge unmet demand".

The health minister said he expects that allocation would comprise around 150,000 doses.

He noted the Commonwealth had made it clear each state had a set allocation that would not be increased, but he hoped to receive the doses ahead of the original schedule.

A pop-up testing clinic is now offering Pfizer vaccines in what's believed to be a first for Victoria. That will be located at the Al-Taqwa College in Truganina, where a teacher worked while infectious with the virus.

Protests 'will lengthen the lockdown'

 Martin Foley has warned protesters and those breaching Victoria's public health orders are only increasing the chance of a lockdown extension.

"It's not in your interests and it's not in the public health interest," Mr Foley said.

"All it will do is lengthen the lockdown."

Earlier today, police condemned the alleged "dog act" of kicking an officer on the ground at a violent anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne after 15 people were arrested overnight.

Victoria Police said action has been taken against 31 people in total who protested against Victoria's sixth lockdown, with charges expected to be laid later today.

North West Metro Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius alleged a police officer was pushed over by protesters" and booted while he was on the ground outside Melbourne East Police Station.

"Kicking a police officer while he's down is a dog act," Mr Cornelius said today.

Video of the rally showed hundreds of people, many of them maskless, walking through the city on Thursday night and chanting "Free Victoria", "sack Dan Andrews" and "no more lockdown".

Contact tracing is currently underway across the state, with Mr Foley defending the decision not to fine rule-breakers who are upfront about their movements.

He said authorities did not believe not fining rule breakers was sending mixed messaging about the need to follow restrictions and that the real punishment was one endured by all Victorians.

"The punishment is extended lockdown – it is a collective punishment," he said.

"What we need is if you are facing those issues for you to come forward freely and share that information," Mr Foley said.

Authorised officers conducted 342 checks on households across Melbourne to ensure they were adhering to their mandatory isolation orders, Mr Foley said.

He thanked everyone who was adhering to the isolation orders for their cooperation.

He noted that a number of households were still in isolation following the Delta outbreak last month in Millner.

Infectious Sydney man flew to Melbourne, then Tasmania

Passengers across two Virgin flights are being sent into isolation after a positive COVID-19 case flew from Sydney to Melbourne and then on to Tasmania.

The positive case entered Melbourne on a valid transit permit, Mr Foley said.

He was escorted by airport staff in PPE to his connecting flight to Launceston.

However, on his arrival in Launceston he was detained by authorities there and sent back to Sydney.

Everyone on the Sydney-Melbourne flight VA808 from Sydney to Melbourne on August 2 and Melbourne-Launceston flight VA1364 also on August 2 are now being considered close contacts and must undertake 14 days of isolation.

READ MORE: NSW records 291 COVID-19 cases as premier warns worst is coming

More lockdowns before Christmas likely

There are now more than 16 million Australians across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland under stay-at-home orders as the highly contagious Delta variants shows no signs of being contained.

The snap lockdown in Victoria will be in place for at least seven days.

Epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely predicts Victoria is in for a "big fight" even though a lockdown is in place.

"The conditions have changed," Professor Blakely told Today.

"It's going to be a rough couple of months unfortunately.

"What's going to happen is places like Melbourne where it pops up, we are just going to have to slam into these rapid lockdowns.

"It's probably going to happen maybe a couple more times until we get to October and November when we get safety."

But in a bit of good news, he expects Christmas and New Year to bring happier times nation-wide.

"As long as we get the vaccination coverage right up it might be a nice time in Australia, to open the borders to other countries.

"Christmas and New Year could be quite good, hoping we don't get a new variant thrown at us.

"I'm keeping my eye on that Christmas, New Year period as being, hopefully, a much better time, but it's going to be rough before we get there unfortunately."

WorkSafe is looking into concerns about the wellbeing of staff at Te Aroha College after receiving a complaint.The Government health and safety watchdog confirmed it had been notified of concerns about staff wellbeing at Te Aroha…

A bizarre fish with 'human-like' teeth has been caught in the United States.

Images of the creature have made headlines around the world after they were posted on the Jeanette's Pier Facebook page – a popular fishing destination and fishing school in North Carolina.

The intimidating creature has been identified as a sheepshead fish.

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The species is known for its hard mouth and several rows of molars which it uses to help it crush the shells of its prey, which include oysters, clams and crabs.

The fish was reportedly caught by Nathan Martin, a regular fisherman at the pier.

He told local media he had been hoping to catch a sheepshead fish when he came face-to-face with a "mouth full of teeth".

READ MORE: Whale watchers spot two rare albino orcas in Japan

"It's a very good fight when you're fighting on the line, it's a really good catch, and it tastes very good," he told McClatchy News.

Some Facebook users commented that the fish had better teeth than they did, while others suggested the teeth could offer "a cheap dental solution".

A resurgent wildfire burned homes north of Athens and blazes across southern Greece forced more evacuations on Thursday as weather conditions worsened and firefighters in a round-the-clock battle strove to save a former royal palace and the birthplace of the ancient Olympics.

In a dramatic scene as flames approached, fire crews went house to house to escort residents out of homes some 20 kilometres north of the capital. The fire threatened the power supply to parts of the capital after damaging the transmission network, officials said, adding that fire crews with more than 700 people were working through the night.

Greek and European Union officials described the huge fires as a consequence of climate change.

READ MORE: 'Fire working its way in all directions': Extreme Canada fires similar to devastating Australian season

Fueled by the worst heat wave in decades, the blazes drew closer to a summer palace at Tatoi outside Athens once used by the former Greek royal family, as well as a major archaeological site in southern Greece that was the birthplace of the ancient Olympics.

Late on Thursday, officials said both sites appeared to be in no immediate danger.

"Our priority is always the protection of human life, followed by the protection of property, the natural environment and critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, achieving all these aims at the same time is simply impossible," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in an evening televised address. The wildfires, he said, display "the reality of climate change."

READ MORE: Tourists, villagers flee as wildfires ravage Turkish resorts

Earlier, he visited Tatoi as well as Ancient Olympia, where flame lighting ceremonies for the modern summer and winter Olympics are held every two years. Earth movers were being used to create big fire breaks around the ancient site.

As additional support arrived from Greece's military and EU countries, water-dropping planes and helicopters swooped over blazes near the capital, in central Greece, on the island of Evia, and near Ancient Olympia to the south.

Ninety-nine new fires were reported while more than 50 villages and settlements were evacuated, including a beachside campsite and hotels on Evia, where boats were used to transport stranded vacationers to safety.

READ MORE: Record wildfire burns on Hawaii's Big Island

A heatwave baking southeast Europe for a second week has also triggered deadly fires in Turkey and Albania and blazes across the region.

North Macedonia's government on Thursday declared the country in a state of crisis for the next 30 days due to wildfires.

The EU Commissioner for the environment, Virginijus Sinkevicius, said the fires and extreme weather globally over the summer were a clear signal for the need to address climate change.

"We are fighting some of the worst wildfires we've seen in decades. But this summer's floods, heatwaves and forest fires can become our new normality," he wrote in a tweet.

"We must ask ourselves: Is this the world we want to live in? We need immediate actions for nature before it's too late."

The EU bolstered assistance from member states and partners to Greece, sending firefighters, water-dropping planes and helicopters from Cyprus, France, Sweden, Romania and Switzerland. Help from the Netherlands and other EU members was also heading to fire-stricken countries in the region.

In an emergency measure, public access to Greek forests at risk of fire will be limited through August 9.

READ MORE: California's largest fire combines to destroy dozens of homes

Greece's Civil Protection Agency said the fire threat across southern Greece would increase further on Friday, with windy weather forecast for parts of the country despite an expected slight dip in temperatures that reached 45 degrees Celsius earlier this week. The heat wave was described as Greece's worst since 1987.

Defence Minister Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos said the armed forces would expand their role in fire prevention, with ground patrols, drones, and aircraft over areas vulnerable to wildfires.

Outside Athens, a forest fire that broke out on the northern fringes of the capital Tuesday and damaged or destroyed scores of homes rekindled, triggering fresh evacuations, threatening homes and sending thick smoke over the capital.

The EU Atmosphere Monitoring Service said smoke plumes from the region's wildfires were clearly visible in satellite images, adding that the estimated intensity of the wildfires in Turkey was at the highest level since records started in 2003.

The fires in Greece have not caused any deaths or serious injuries. But Greek scientists said the total destruction in just three days this month exceeded 50 per cent of the average area burned in the country in previous years. An Athens Observatory report said an estimated 6,000 hectares went up in smoke between Sunday and Wednesday, compared to 10,400 hectares in the whole of last year.

The causes of the Greek wildfires were unclear, but authorities say human error and carelessness are most frequently to blame.

Australians who live overseas will no longer be granted automatic permission to leave the country, in the latest Morrison government effort to curtail international travel.

Instead, they'll be forced to apply to the Australian Border Force for an exemption that can be granted in what the federal government describes as "exceptional circumstances".

The change, introduced this week to come into force on August 11, appears designed to deter overseas-based Australians from flying back for a visit, rather than a permanent relocation.

READ MORE: Prime Minister outlines Australia's pathway out of the pandemic

Until August 11, Australians living overseas don't need to apply for an exemption but generally need to show their passport to a Border Force official at the airport when leaving the country.

It's unclear how difficult it will be for Australians who normally live overseas to be granted an exemption beyond that date.

The government argues the original automatic exemption was meant to allow overseas residents to leave once, not return for a visit, and says those people have already had "substantial time" to leave.

"The exemption was not intended to enable frequent travel between countries," an explanatory statement attached to the legislation says.

"Further, as repatriation flights continue, it will be critical to manage the numbers of people leaving Australia with the intention of returning in the near future to ensure flight and quarantine availability is prioritised for individuals who have been stranded overseas for some time. 

"The amendment will reduce the pressure on Australia's quarantine capacity, reduce the risks posed to the Australian population from COVID-19, and assist in returning vulnerable Australians back home."

David Aaron, a semi-retired former Sydneysider splitting his time between the north of Portugal and the Philippines, said he understood that argument but insisted it was a problem of the government's own making, thanks to its "mishandling" of the pandemic.

"I was wrongly under the impression that being a citizen of a country gave you certain rights," he told 9News.com.au.

"And I just feel incredibly uncomfortable, that the country that I loved so much for so long, and have done so much for … that I can't go back without pulling strings and jumping through hoops makes me feel terribly uncomfortable."

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews told Nine newspapers the change was made for consistency.

"This does not stop Australians ordinarily resident outside Australia from departing. However, these people will now need to apply for an exemption," she said.

"The exemption's regime is based on health advice and enables people to travel if essential, but is ultimately about keeping Australians safe from overseas COVID transmission."

There are about 34,000 Australians registered as wanting to return from overseas, a situation further worsened by a cut to flight caps in July.

Many Australians living overseas who have no desire to return home permanently have now gone years without seeing their family and friends in Australia after having flights cancelled in the early stages of the pandemic.

While many countries have imposed strict entry restrictions during the pandemic, Australia is the only one to ban its citizens from leaving.

There are strong wind warnings for every state and territory in Australia today except South Australia.

Moist, blustery southwesterly winds are directing showers and alpine snow over Tasmania, Victoria, southern South Australia and southeastern NSW.

Dry and settled elsewhere under a dry airmass and broad high.

LIVE UPDATES: Victorians wake to sixth lockdown

Surf and swell conditions will be hazardous for parts of the NSW coast today with warnings in place for Coffs Coast, Macquarie Coast and Hunter Coast today.

Another windy day is forecast in Victoria prompting gale warnings for East Gippsland Coast, Gippsland Lakes, West Coast, Central Coast and Central Gippsland Coast.

The Bureau of Meteorology has also issued a wind warnings for the far north of Queensland and Peninsula Coast.

In Western Australia wind warnings are being issued for the Kimberley Coast, West Kimberley Coast, Pilbara Coast East, Pilbara Coast West and Ningaloo Coast.

A cold and windy day to end the week in Tasmania with winds, showers and a low of 8C in Hobart.

In the Northern Territory the winds are expected to impact Beagle Bonaparte Coast and Roper Groote Coast with warning for both areas.

South Australia is the only state to avoid the wild and windy conditions today however drivers in Adelaide have been warned of reduced visibility with morning due to fog which could create dangerous road conditions in some areas.

US intelligence agencies are digging through a treasure trove of genetic data that could be key to uncovering the origins of coronavirus – as soon as they can decipher it.

This giant catalogue of information contains genetic blueprints drawn from virus samples studied at the lab in Wuhan, China which some officials believe may have been the source of the COVID-19 outbreak, multiple people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

It's unclear exactly how or when US intelligence agencies gained access to the information, but the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers – leaving open the possibility they were hacked, sources said.

READ MORE: Health expert slams NSW's plan for COVID-19 freedoms

Still, translating this mountain of raw data into usable information – which is only one part of the intelligence community's 90-day push to uncover the pandemic's origins – presents a range of challenges, including harnessing enough computing power to process it all.

To do that, intelligence agencies are relying on supercomputers at the Department of Energy's National Labs, a collection of 17 elite government research institutions.

There's also a manpower issue. Not only do intelligence agencies need government scientists skilled enough to interpret complex genetic sequencing data and who have the proper security clearance, they also need to speak Mandarin, since the information is written in Chinese with a specialised vocabulary.

"Obviously there are scientists who are (security) cleared," one source familiar with the intelligence told CNN. "But Mandarin-speaking ones who are cleared? That's a very small pool. And not just any scientists, but ones who specialise in bio? So you can see how this quickly becomes difficult."

READ MORE: New information on Wuhan researchers' illness furthers debate on pandemic origins

Officials conducting the 90-day review hope this information will help answer the question of how the virus jumped from animals to humans. Unlocking that mystery is essential to ultimately determining whether COVID-19 leaked from the lab or was transmitted to humans from animals in the wild, multiple sources told CNN.

Investigators both inside and outside the government have long sought genetic data from 22,000 virus samples that were being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That data was removed from the internet by Chinese officials in September 2019, and China has since refused to turn over this and other raw data on early coronavirus cases to the World Health Organisation and the US.

The question for investigators is whether the WIV or other labs in China possessed virus samples or other contextual information that could help them trace the coronavirus' evolutionary history.

Two scientists who study coronaviruses told CNN they are sceptical that there is any genetic data either in the tranche of 22,000 samples or any other database from the WIV that scientists don't already know about.

READ MORE: China seals off city as its worst virus outbreak in a year grows

"Basically in [a 2020 research paper published in Nature], the WIV talked about all the sequences they had up until a certain point in time – it's what most scientists virologists believe, that's pretty much what they had," said Dr Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

A source familiar with the US investigation would neither confirm nor deny that any of the data pertaining to those 22,000 samples is among what US intelligence agencies are currently analysing.

No 'smoking gun'

Sources familiar with the effort say filling in that missing genetic link won't be enough to definitively prove whether the virus originated in the lab at Wuhan or first emerged naturally. Officials will still need to piece together other contextual clues to determine the true origins of the pandemic.

But it is a critical puzzle piece that the Biden administration has been prioritising.

"The most prized technical data in this context are genetic sequences, database entries and contextual information about the provenance of the samples and the time and context in which they were acquired – information people would use to place them in a narrative of the origins of SARS, COVID," one source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

For now, senior intelligence officials still say that they are genuinely split between the two prevailing theories on the pandemic's origins, or some combination of both scenarios.

CNN reported last month that senior Biden administration officials overseeing the 90-day review now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild – a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory.

Multiple sources told CNN that absent an unexpected windfall of new information, officials don't expect to uncover a "smoking gun" like intercepted communications, for example – that would offer definitive proof for either theory. The Biden administration's 90-day push is predicated on the expectation that science, not intelligence will be the key.

Intelligence officials are tasked with addressing several "scientific knowledge gaps" about the virus' evolution, according to the collection guidance governing the 90-day push, distributed to more than a dozen agencies on June 11 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and obtained by CNN.

The memo instructs the intelligence community to "expand its collection" and consider data already in its possession to identify both the initial host of the coronavirus and any species that it may have passed through as it adapted to humans – or to find as "any progenitor virus and/or virus that could serve as backbone for genetic engineering purposes."

But former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told CNN that the US intelligence community already had sufficient collection on the topic of COVID-19 origins.

"Obviously the more, the better. But we've had extraordinary insight into this topic for many months, much more than has been declassified. Pretending we didn't is political theatre and a classic example of a politician trying to buy time by using the IC as a scapegoat," he told CNN in a statement.

Digging into the science

That's where the genomic data from the Wuhan lab could come in.

The genetic code of a given virus is the signature that allows scientists to tell the difference between the Delta and Beta variants of the coronavirus, for example. It can also offer clues as to how the virus has adapted or mutated over time, including whether it shows signs of human manipulation – a kind of genetic history.

Many scientists continue to believe that the most likely scenario is that the virus jumped from animals to humans naturally. But despite testing thousands of animals, researchers still haven't identified the intermediate host through which the virus passed as it adapted to humans.

But some researchers, intelligence officials and Republican lawmakers believe that researchers at the WIV might have genetically altered a virus in the lab, using a controversial kind of research known as "gain of function" that could have infected researchers who then spread it in their community.s

Several plausible theories

It's also plausible that the initial infection took place naturally outside of the lab, perhaps while a scientist was collecting a sample from an animal in the wild, and that scientist then spread the virus unknowingly when he returned to the lab with the samples, multiple sources familiar with the intelligence explained.

"If it was the latter, it was likely brought into a lab to study because someone got sick … which means there were an unknowable number of other people who were already sick," the source familiar with the probe said.

Understanding exactly which viruses researchers at the WIV were working on could provide important evidence for any one of these theories. It's one of the reasons that investigators on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have been keenly focused on the database that was taken offline in 2019.

But it might not prove anything definitively, sources familiar with the intelligence say. Even if scientists in the intelligence community are able to use the data from the lab to stitch together a complete genetic history that shows how the virus mutated, they might not have enough information about how it was handled by the Chinese lab to determine with a high level of confidence that it leaked.

"Despite having that complete history of variants, [officials might] lack the contextual information to make sense of it in a narrative way," the source familiar with the investigation explained.

"Even a complete sequence history is difficult to obtain. And doesn't really tell us anything about the origins of the pandemic itself without the context," this person added.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have jumped into the uncertainty with their own report claiming that "the preponderance of evidence suggests" the coronavirus was "accidentally" released from a lab in Wuhan in 2019 – an assertion that goes far beyond the intelligence community's current view of the matter.