Coronavirus live news: US suffers one Covid death every minute as global cases






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Hong Kong-Singapore travel bubble pops

The much hyped Hong Kong-Singapore travel bubble has popped, one day before the first flights were set to depart.

Originally scheduled to start yesterday, the bubble was postponed after Hong Kong health authorities reported a rise in new cases, including 43 on Saturday alone, 13 of which were untraced local infections.

The bubble allows people to travel between Singapore and Hong Kong for leisure, and to take a Covid test in lieu of quarantine or home isolation.

Tickets for the flights – once a day and with 200 passengers – from Singapore to Hong Kong sold out within a day of the bubble being announced earlier this month, the Straits Times reported.

But on Saturday Hong Kong’s Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Edward Yau said the two governments had decided to delay the bubble’s launch by two weeks.

“Doing this is necessary to avoid any inconvenience caused by the abrupt changes of the scheme to passengers, particularly those who need to return to Hong Kong in a short time,” he said. It launched with a built in mechanism to increase, decrease, or suspend them depending on each locality’s Covid situation. This included an immediate two week suspension if the seven-day average number of cases reached more than five.

A Hong Kong government spokesperson said the local situation had “deteriorated rapidly”.

“The increasing trend of the number of unlinked local cases shows that there is an invisible and continuous transmission chain in the community. It is expected that the epidemic situation in Hong Kong will still remain severe in the near future.”

G-DLEE AVIATION 2020
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