COVID-19 Informer: How the world is tackling contact tracing

France's state-supported 'StopCOVID' contact-tracing app should enter its testing phase a week on Monday when the country starts to unwind its lockdown.

France has chosen the short-range Bluetooth "handshakes" between devices as the best approach, dismissing the alternative of using location data pursued by some countries in Asia as intrusive.

Germany changed course last week over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use, backing an approach supported by Google and Apple along with a growing number of other European countries.

The UK will trial a new coronavirus tracing program next week on the Isle of Wight, just off the south coast of England.

The system being trialled next week would include asking citizens on the island to download a smartphone app as well as traditional ways of tracing those who have come into contact with a patient who has tested positive.

Cabinet minister Michael Gove said there was "a view to having that in place more widely later this month".

Over the weekend, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has revealed that doctors prepared to announce his death as he battled coronavirus last month.

He described it as a "tough old moment", telling a Sunday newspaper: "They had a strategy to deal with a 'death of Stalin'-type scenario.

"I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place."

New coronavirus hot spots have emerged in Russia and Pakistan while in the US experts are worried the coronavirus will go on spreading in 'a slow burn' because efforts to contain it have been incomplete at best.

"We're looking at the prospect that this may be a persistent spread," Dr Scott Gottlieb said, "with a steady stream of 20,000 to 30,000 new cases daily that result in 1,000 deaths a day across the country."

Meanwhile, a primary school in Sydney's outer west has been closed today after a student tested positive for coronavirus.

Warragamba Public School will be non-operational for on-site learning this morning as contact tracing occurs and the school is cleaned. At-home learning will continue.

Only yesterday a Victorian teacher has tested positive to COVID-19, forcing the school to be closed for three days.

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