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 […]
Testing
“We’re taking one step forward, five steps back,” Devi Sridhar, professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and on the Scottish Government’s covid-19 advisory group, wrote yesterday, in summing up her exasperation about the covid-19 situation in the UK. She’s not wrong. Lockdown was a big social sacrifice, one where the vulnerable suffered […]
‘One step forward, five steps back’
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?
While the media’s attention was focused on the answers of Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans in the first day of the Holyrood-Salmond inquiry yesterday, Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman came up with some pretty curious answers of her own in response to questioning about the care homes crisis in parliament on Tuesday. Asked about the Sunday Post’s […]
The Scottish Govt can’t wash its hands of hospital discharge to care homes
“Questions remain about the capacity of the state to deal adequately with massive social programmes including wholescale testing and tracing and, perhaps one day, vaccination. Why has it taken this long to reach the point of a testing system?”
Test and trace: There’s still a long way to go
“I’m relieved that the Scottish Government is starting to make progress on protecting Scotland from this virus but there is still a gap between where we appear to be going and where experts far more experienced in this than I say we should be going. The challenge ahead is daunting but the virus doesn’t really care about half measures.”
Reviewing Scotland’s Testing Strategy
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
“This is a health crisis. This is an economic crisis. But in Scotland, this is a full-scale national political crisis too.”
Robin McAlpine: The lack of a Scottish virus strategy is a national crisis
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 […]
A viable route out of lockdown
“The Scottish Government must change track now. It must adopt, in full, the WHO’s pandemic strategies and must do it quickly. Otherwise, we’re only weeks away from a catastrophe that was warned about months ago but apparently ignored.”