Exactly six months today since full lockdown, Scotland is back in a mini-lockdown again. This time, only other people’s homes are off-limits. As in England, pubs will shut at 10pm. There are good reasons to be sceptical that these measures will be sufficient to contain the spread of covid-19. They appear suspiciously like applying maximum […]
Community testing
How do we stop the resurgence of covid-19 in Scotland? Everyone is agreed that it is resurgent, and that we need to stop it, so let’s try to focus on the ‘how’. Common Weal today publishes a new report by head of policy & research Craig Dalzell which looks at exactly that. It proposes a change in […]
‘Warning lights’: Does Scotland need a new covid-19 elimination strategy?
The new “test, trace, isolate, support” strategy announced by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon yesterday was an important milestone in Scotland’s Covid-19 crisis. The paper sets out a distinctive Scottish approach to community tracing and testing, and thus is the first strategic disjuncture from the UK response to this crisis. As Common Weal head of policy […]
“Track, train, employ”?
The UK is going Korean. Having led with a herd immunity approach to this crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now said to be convinced that South Korea’s “test, trace, isolate” is the model for Britain. That means forcing the rate of transmission down low through the lockdown, and at the same time building a […]
Putting the genie back in the bottle
Nicola Sturgeon announced on Thursday that they are starting planning for an end to lockdown, but think tanks and the third sector are way ahead of them.
Scotland Plans the End of Lockdown: What Comes Next?
Scotland’s new Chief Medical Officer, Dr Gregor Smith, can’t say when the lockdown measures will be lifted here. We “are not quite at the stage yet where we have got the data which would allow us to be able to pinpoint when these measures are likely to be lifted,” he told the BBC. Correct, but […]