Covid clusters ‘no cause for alarm’

A NUMBER of new coronavirus clusters in Scotland should not cause undue alarm, Nicola Sturgeon said, as she revealed the R number has potentially risen above one.

The First Minister said clusters have emerged in Glasgow and Orkney in addition to the one in Aberdeen which led to a local lockdown.

A household cluster in Peterhead is also being investigated and has led to the closure of a primary school.

Ms Sturgeon told the Scottish Government’s regular coronavirus briefing that provisional figures indicate the upper estimate for the R number – the average number of people infected by each person with Covid-19 – last week could have been as high as 1.3.

She added: “When the prevalence across the country is low the R number will be disproportionately affected by outbreaks on the scale of the one in Aberdeen.”

In Aberdeen, 182 cases of coronavirus have been linked to the outbreak and 961 contacts have been identified.

A cluster of eight cases was identified in Glasgow on Wednesday and another in Orkney where potential links to the Aberdeen outbreak are being investigated.

Ms Sturgeon said “clusters of this kind, I’m afraid to say, are inevitable”, adding: “We should become more used to hearing about several different clusters because the virus hasn’t gone away.

“While we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed, it is equally important that we’re not in any way complacent.”

She said there were 47 new confirmed coronavirus cases in Scotland in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 19,173.

Of these, 26 are in the Grampian health board area, 10 are in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and three are in NHS Orkney.

No new deaths of people who tested positive for coronavirus in the past 28 days were reported, meaning the total remains at 2,491.