Next week too early to ease lockdown, warns Sturgeon

NEXT week may be too early to safely lift any of the lockdown restrictions, the first minister has said.

Speaking at the Scottish Government’s daily briefing in Edinburgh, Nicola Sturgeon said “real progress” has been made on tackling the spread of the virus and the ‘R’ number (the infection rate) is believed to be below one.

This means each person infected with the virus passes it on to less than one other person, and is down from above three at the start of the lockdown.

But Ms Sturgeon warned these gains are too “fragile” to enable her to be confident that lockdown restrictions can be eased at the next review date of May 7.

She said it is too early to introduce a scheme previously suggested which would allow people to see a small “bubble” of others outside their immediate household, saying “anything like that right now might edge us over the crucial one number”.

She also announced the number of people who have died after testing positive for the virus in Scotland has risen to 1,475, up 60 from 1,415 on Wednesday.

She said 11,353 people have now tested positive for Covid-19, up by 319 from 11,034 the day before. There are 1,748 people in hospital with confirmed or suspected Covid-19, up 21 from 1,727 the previous day. Of these, 109 are in intensive care, a drop of five.

She added: “We are not confident the R number is very f ar below one yet, and that means any easing up at all in the current restriction – either formally by government decisions or informally by people becoming a bit less compliant – would quickly send it back above one.”