UK coronavirus live: Croatia, Austria and Trinidad and Tobago added to quarantine list – as it happened

That’s all from me today, folks. Thanks for reading. Here is a summary of today’s key events:

• Travellers returning from Croatia, Austria and Trinidad and Tobago will have to quarantine for a fortnight if they arrive back after 4am on Saturday
• But those coming back from Portugal will walk free after the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, added it to the government’s list of “travel corridors”
• Northampton now has the second highest Covid infection rate in England, after Oldham.
• But it is in Birmingham where officials are talking openly about being added to the government’s “watch list” of areas needing help to keep infections down
• Another meat processing plant has had to close following an outbreak of Covid, this time in Northern Ireland. Thirty-five workers at Cranswick Country Foods in Cullybackey in County Antrim have tested positive.
• There has been a week-on-week rise in the number of people testing positive in England for Covid: 6,616 people, an increase of 27% compared with the previous week.
• Scotland has recorded the highest number of daily coronavirus cases in almost three months, with 77 testing positive overnight.

If you are not yet sated, switch over to our Global Covid blog, which will be updated throughout the night.

The shadow transport secretary, Jim McMahon, is calling on the government to publish the evidence behind its decision to add Croatia and other countries to its quarantine list.

PA news agency has just posted its update on the the rolling seven-day rate of new cases of Covid-19 for every local authority area in England.

The figures, for the seven days to August 17, are based on tests carried out in laboratories (pillar one of the Government’s testing programme) and in the wider community (pillar two).

The rate is expressed as the number of new cases per 100,000 people. Data for the most recent three days (August 18-20) has been excluded as it is incomplete and likely to be revised.

In Oldham 187 new cases were recorded in the seven days to August 17 – the equivalent of 78.9 per 100,000 people, down from 111.8 in the seven days to August 10.

Northampton is almost level with Oldham on 78.4, up slightly from 74.4, with 176 new cases.

Blackburn with Darwen is third, where the rate has fallen from 81.5 to 67.5, with 101 new cases.

In Leicester the rate continues to fall, down from 70.3 to 52.5, with 186 new cases.

Other areas recording notable week-on-week jumps include:
– Manchester (up from 38.5 to 49.0, with 271 new cases)
– Bury (up from 22.0 to 33.0, with 63 new cases)
– Stoke-on-Trent (up from 15.6 to 26.1, with 67 new cases)

Less than a third of people in England being tested for coronavirus in the wider population are receiving their results within 24 hours — despite Boris Johnson promising all results would be turned around within that timeframe two months ago.

The latest data on the NHS Track and Trace programme show that 60.5% of people who were tested for Covid-19 in the week ending August 12 at a regional site or mobile testing unit, a so-called “in-person” test, received their result within 24 hours.

Of those tested that week at a satellite test centre, only 1.2% received their results within 24 hours while just 3.8% of people who used a home testing kits got results within 24 hours.

Across all four types of testing in the wider community, known as pillar two, only 28.2% of people received results within 24 hours.

This is a drop from 34.4% the previous week and 57.4% during the week ending July 1, the data showed.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the delays were due to an IT system failure at one of the laboratories which had delayed processing results and created a backlog.

Johnson had pledged that, by the end of June, the results of all in-person tests would be back within 24 hours.

He told the House of Commons on June 3 he would get “all tests turned around within 24 hours by the end of June, except for difficulties with postal tests or insuperable problems like that”.

Much of the attention around Oldham’s infection rates have focused on the town’s Asian community.

But a pub in the wealthy — and largely white – Uppermill area of Saddleworth has just been ordered to close by Oldham council for “continually” breaking lockdown regulations.

A meat processing plant in Co Antrim is to temporarily close after 35 staff members tested positive for coronavirus.

Cranswick Country Foods in Cullybackey, which processes pigs, will close from Saturday evening for a deep clean and to allow all staff members to be tested for Covid-19, the company has confirmed.

In a statement Cranswick Country Foods said: “There has been a recent increase in the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Ballymena and the wider region and this has been acknowledged as a community issue.

“As a result of this, we can confirm that a number of colleagues at our Ballymena site have tested positive for Covid-19. Working with the Public Health Authority (PHA), we have taken the decision to send all of our colleagues for testing.

“If the test results are positive, the individual will be required to self-isolate for 10 days; if the test results are negative, the individual will be required to self-isolate for 14 days.

“Therefore, the site will need to temporarily suspend production.”

Trade union Unite, which has members working at the Cranswick plant, said it was seeking urgent clarification from management regarding the extent of the cluster and the company’s plans to ensure the facility is safe when it re-opens.

Unite is also seeking assurances that workers sent home to self-isolate will not suffer any loss of pay.

Unite Regional Officer Liam Gallagher said: “The highly profitable meat processing sector relies on precarious, low-paid workers who may be reluctant to report symptoms or self-isolate because they fear a loss of pay.”

Another 51 people in Northern Ireland have tested positive for the virus on Thursday according to the Department of Health.

Some 298 people have tested positive for the virus in the last seven days, largely in the Mid and East Antrim area and Belfast.

The Daily Mirror’s associate editor, Kevin Maguire, is among many would-be holiday makers now cancelling their trips after Croatia and other countries were removed from the UK’s list of quarantine-free “travel corridors”.

Lockdown restrictions could be tightened in Blackburn and Pendle in east Lancashire, Inzy Rashid at Sky News is reporting. Currently both areas are subject to “enhanced measures”, along with Greater Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire, which restrict gatherings in homes and gardens.

Dominic Harrison, Blackburn’s director of public health, says about half of all confirmed cases of coronavirus locally are within the same households. Most infections are clustered in very small areas he said, heralding a “hyper-local approach” to tackling the outbreaks from now on.

He writes in the Lancashire Telegraph:

Here someone, maybe a younger household member has become infected and may be asymptomatic. They will unknowingly pass it on to other household members and as an older member gets symptoms the whole family gets tested and find out they are all positive. A very large number of the remaining cases in the borough are clustered in very small areas, in a number of streets, statistically at a ‘lower super output area’- of about 1,500 people. Here it is clear that transmission must be occurring between family, friends and neighbours.

Blackburn has around double the testing rates of the national average he said, but the figures remain concerning:

So far, despite our best efforts, we still have amongst the highest rates of transmission in the country. We had our highest rate of cases per 100,000 of the population in the week ending August 12 We have had a Covid confirmed case rate of 94.7 per 100,000 of the population – which represents 141 cases per week. Our testing rates are still about double the national average at 210 per 100,000 and our positivity rate is at 6.5 per cent. This is also the highest it has been in recent weeks.

If we are going to avoid a full lockdown by central government we now need to be even more prescriptive on what can and can’t be done, to target the behaviours we know risk passing on the virus and to move to a stricter enforcement approach to breaches of the guidance.

The approach we take from now on is going to have to be even more targeted on hyper-local areas of highest transmission.”

Shapps said the decision to change the travel corridors took a range of factors into account, including:

• the estimated prevalence of Covid-19 in a country
• the level and rate of change in the incidence of confirmed positive cases
• the extent of testing in a country
• the testing regime and test positivity
• the extent to which cases can be accounted for by a contained outbreak as opposed to more general transmission in the community
• government actions
• and other relevant epidemiological information

Shapps said Portugal has now been added to the list of travel corridors, meaning that travellers from there will no longer have to quarantine for 14 days.

Croatia, Austria and Trinidad & Tobago will be removed from the UK’s list of travel corridors, the transport secretary Grant Shapps has said.

That means anyone returning from those countries will have to quarantine for 14 days if they return after 4am on Saturday.

The Belfast Telegraph has more details on the tightening of restrictions in Northern Ireland.

It reports the Northern Irish health secretary, Robin Swann, talking of a “significant and difficult” outbreak at a meat-processing plant in Co Antrim, after 35 new cases emerged from within staff, some infecting friends and family.

“All workers in the factory now have to self-isolate,” he said, adding that the plant will be closed to allow for deep cleaning and the testing of staff. “I am becoming concerned with the increase in community transmission,” he said. “There will be no further relaxations of any other measures.

Swann said the R rate in Northern Ireland is currently 1.3 and is “definitely” above 1, the newspaper reported.

The UK government said 41,403 people had died in the UK within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of 5pm on Wednesday, an increase of six on the day before.

Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 57,000 deaths registered in the UK where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate.

The government also said that as of 9am on Thursday, there had been a further 1,182 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus. Overall, 322,280 cases have been confirmed.

Lockdown restrictions are being tightened in Northern Ireland after 51 new coronavirus infections were reported overnight. This from the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent, Chris Page: