Coronavirus live news: New Zealand records first new cases for weeks as Beijing bans high-risk travellers from leaving city

Great news for British-based sausage roll fans:

Singapore will halt construction of the fifth terminal at its Changi Airport for at least two years to assess how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact the aviation sector and the future of travel, the city-state’s transport minister said on Tuesday.

The government was carrying out a study of how the aviation sector will change, and the design of new terminal would be altered to account for new safety requirements as well as changing needs of airlines, Khaw Boon Wan said.

“We have decided to take a pause for two years. Let us complete this study of the future of aviation,” Khaw said, according to an audio recording of his remarks on a video conference call provided by the transport ministry.

The fifth terminal was scheduled to be completed in the 2030s, and was to handle up to 50 million passengers per year in its initial phase. Changi was among the world’s busiest airports in 2019, with more than 68 million passengers.

The Yomiuriland amusement park in Tokyo reopened today, which was particularly good news for the one person who turned up to ride this rollercoaster:

… and the two people who climbed aboard this one:

Hong Kong will let groups of up to 50 people meet from Friday, raising an earlier limit of eight people, after reporting only a small number of coronavirus cases in recent weeks, health secretary Sophia Chan has said. Hong Kong has reported a total of 1,113 cases and four deaths since the outbreak began in late January.

If you live in England this might be interesting and/or useful:

The government’s weekly Covid-19 surveillance reports for England can be found here. For those living or interested in other areas of the UK:

• There are some excellent data on the virus in Wales here.
• Data for Scotland is updated daily and can be found here.
• Ulster University runs a Covid-19 dashboard for Northern Ireland here, which takes some information from the NI department of health’s own dashboard here (but has some additional functionality). More information on coronavirus in Northern Ireland is available on the department of health website here.

AstraZeneca’s potential coronavirus vaccine is likely to provide protection against contracting Covid-19 for about a year, the company’s chief executive told a Belgian radio station today, reports Reuters.

The British company has already begun human trials of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, with a phase I trial in Britain due to end soon and a phase III trial already begun, Pascal Soriot told broadcaster Bel RTL. “We think that it will protect for about a year,” Soriot said.

AstraZeneca said on Saturday that it had signed contracts with France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands to supply the European Union with up to 400m doses of the potential vaccine. It has also agreed deals with Britain and the US.

“If all goes well, we will have the results of the clinical trials in August/September. We are manufacturing in parallel. We will be ready to deliver from October if all goes well,” Soriot said.

Germany launched its coronavirus tracing app today, which officials say is so secure even government ministers can use it.

Smartphone apps have been touted as a hi-tech tool in the effort to track down potential Covid-19 infections. Experts say finding new cases quickly is key to clamping down on fresh clusters, especially as countries slowly emerge from lockdowns and try to avoid a second wave of infections and deaths.

But governments in privacy-conscious Europe have run into legal and cultural hurdles trying to reconcile the need for effective tracing with the continent’s strict data privacy standards.

Germany, where a person’s right to their own data even after death is rooted in the constitution and even protects the privacy of convicted criminals, has proved a particular challenge.

The German government insists users will have full control over their data. There is no requirement to download the Corona-Warn-App. It’s up to the user to confirm their test results and trigger the process of informing possible contacts that they might in turn have been exposed.

Still, concerns remain. A poll this month published by the public broadcaster ARD found that slightly more Germans (42%) said they would use the tracing app than the 39% who said they wouldn’t. The rest either said they didn’t have a smartphone or hadn’t made up their mind.

Russia has reported 8,248 new coronavirus cases today, bringing its nationwide infection tally to 545,458. The authorities said 193 people had died of the virus in the last day, raising the official death toll to 7,284.

The wife of Ukraine’s president, Olena Zelenska, has been hospitalised after contracting coronavirus and her condition is stable, the presidential office said today. Zelenska said last week she had tested positive for coronavirus, while her husband, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and their two children had tested negative.

I completely forgot to introduce myself this morning/evening/whatever-it-is-where-you-are. How very rude. This is Simon Burnton taking on the live blog for the next few hours. If you have seen any stories that deserve our attention, or if you have any tips, comments or suggestions for our coverage then please let me know by sending me a message either to @Simon_Burnton on Twitter or via email. Thanks!

Spain is considering imposing a quarantine on visitors from the UK when it opens its borders next week in reciprocity to a similar measure imposed by London, the Spanish foreign minister, Arancha González Laya, has told on the BBC. “We will be checking what the UK will be doing and we will be in a dialogue with the UK to see whether or not we should be introducing reciprocity as they have different measures than the rest of the European Union,” González Laya said.

An Israeli company has developed technology that can identify and locate Covid-19 outbreaks by sampling sewage. This is from the AFP:

An Israeli company is monitoring coronavirus traces in a coastal city’s sewers and hopes to deploy its technology more widely to provide early warning of future concentrations of the respiratory disease.

Ari Goldfarb saw a unique opportunity to test the limits of underground technology developed by his firm when coronavirus patients were moved into a hotel in Ashkelon taken over by the government.

Fixated by wastewater since seeing raw sewage streaming into the sea while surfing as a teenager, Goldfarb founded the firm Kando initially to pinpoint industrial waste in the city’s labyrinthine municipal sewage system.

Eight years on, the company’s network of sensors, autosamplers and controllers placed under manholes in Ashkelon are tracing coronavirus.

In May, Kando partnered with scientists and mathematicians in Israel, Europe and the United States to embark on a month-long pilot to determine the accuracy of their technology.

The findings, said Goldfarb, conformed with the health ministry’s data showing the breadth and the near-exact location of confirmed virus carriers, including the hotel used by patients.

“We’re the only one who can tell where the outbreak is and how big the outbreak is in the city,” said Goldfarb.

Sewage has also been tested in cities like Melbourne, Paris, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Valencia and the US state of Massachusetts – although mostly on a small scale and without precision.

Kando’s manhole sensors can measure the flow of wastewater and how far it has travelled, using algorithms to determine the best moment to automatically collect samples.

They are then analysed at a number of laboratories, with the findings instructing the firm on the direction to follow within the sewage system’s pipes to reach the source of the virus, Goldfarb said.

Scientists around the world have already detected Covid-19 in patients’ stools within sewage systems, but can only provide a general reading of the presence of the virus in a community.

Kando’s technology can go further, according to Goldfarb, by giving a more precise location of an outbreak, potentially helping authorities control diseases.

With many coronavirus cases being asymptomatic, broad wastewater checks could pin down the virus before it spreads widely.

The technology can detect the virus “in the sewage (of) asymptomatic people, so we know about a new outbreak before it really happens”, said Goldfarb.

Kando’s technology already proved successful in helping authorities contain a 2013 polio outbreak in the southern town of Hura, he said.

Some of the samples are tested at Ben Gurion University in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, where researcher Karin Yaniv inserted a tray of samples gleaned from sewage into a machine.

The adjacent computer screen lit up with lines indicating the presence of Covid-19 in the samples.

Although Yaniv saw “challenges going through the raw sewage”, due to the amount of other materials, she was convinced it is the best way to forestall a virus outbreak.

It is also more practical than trying to test the entire population regularly and, once the technology is in place, it can be used to detect other diseases.

“If you have a platform to detect viruses, specifically corona, we can use the same platform for other viruses,” said Yaniv, a PhD researcher at the university’s biotechnology engineering department.

After the Ashkelon pilot, a number of Israeli municipalities have expressed interest in the technology, but authorities have not commissioned Kando to roll out the project more widely.

As well as the health benefits, Goldfarb is hopeful his firm could prevent a repeat of the sweeping economic shutdown which was imposed to stop the spread of coronavirus.

“Decision-makers can take decisions based on data and they can close specific areas,” he said. That means “people will not lose their jobs, that means that people will have a better future – (and) the next outbreak will be managed much better.”

New Zealand has suspended exemptions for people in managed isolation on compassionate grounds, after two women who were allowed to drive from Auckland to Wellington to visit a dying relative later tested positive for Covid-19.

Currently travellers who arrive in New Zealand and show any known symptoms of coronavirus are placed in quarantine, while those who declare no symptoms spend 14 days in managed isolation, staying in a hotel with other people in a similar situation, and allowed to leave only when accompanied by security personnel. You can read a description of managed isolation here. According to New Zealand’s ministry of health, there are 155 people in quarantine and 3,412 in managed isolation. In the last week, 216 people applied for an exemption, and 90 were approved (there is a tailback of 311 cases in process).

“Compassionate exemptions should be rare and rigorous and it appears that this case did not include the checks that we expected to be happening. That’s not acceptable,” said the health minister, David Clark. “Our border measures are a key line of defence against Covid-19 and we must ensure they are as robust as possible.

“The director general will be reviewing the processes around these latest two cases, noting that he has already made it a requirement that all individuals must return a negative covid test before leaving managed isolation facilities from now on.”

Let’s take a quick look at that the British papers are saying about coronavirus this morning … and the Guardian’s headline is “Lengthy queues as shops in England reopen” alongside a large photo of the crowds.

The Times and the Scotsman both focus on education, with “Millions of pupils doing no work” and “Parents lead backlash over ‘chaotic’ back to school plan”, respectively.

The Telegraph quotes former Tory leader William Hague saying “Lockdown a ‘disaster for society’”.

The i has “Retail therapy aids stricken UK economy”, while the FT says “Retail renewal draws crowds”.