A year in jail and £5k fine if you lie to virus tracers

PEOPLE who lie to coronavirus contact tracers could face a fine of £5,000 and 12 months in prison.

Nicola Sturgeon has said her test, trace and isolate policy would rely on Covid-19 carriers telling the truth about who they have met recently.

The Coronavirus Act empowers public health officers to order anyone who is suspected of carrying Covid-19 to be assessed and provide a biological sample.

They will also be required to answer questions and provide information about their health or other relevant matters, including their travel history and other individuals with whom they may have had contact.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘Under the Coronavirus Act 2020, individuals may be required to provide information to the public health officer. It is an offence to fail to comply with the requirement.’

Those who fail to comply or who lie to the contact tracers face 12 months in jail and a £5,000 fine if convicted of an offence.

Scottish ministers have been accused of a ‘cover-up’ by opposition politicians for their failure to disclose an outbreak linked to a Nike conference in late February. That event is believed to have been the source of the first case of community transmission in Scotland but was only exposed last week.

Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said at the weekend that contact tracing was effective but admitted: ‘If we are not told by someone all the contacts they’ve had, then we cannot trace.’

Scottish ministers have rejected intrusive tracing measures used in other countries, such as CCTV monitoring and checking the location of credit card transactions.

Scotland’s contact tracing app will only alert users if they have been close to a carrier. It will not divulge the location of the contact, and will still rely on ‘old-fashioned’ contact tracing by word of mouth.

Other countries have faced problems with carriers lying to tracers, most recently in South Korea. It was forced to reimpose lockdown on pubs and clubs after a cluster of cases emerged from a popular entertainment district in Seoul.

Venues were required by law to collect signed documents from patrons but many provided false names and phone numbers, hampering contact tracing efforts.

In Singapore, people who lie to contact tracers face a fine of more than £5,000 and six months in jail. A tracing app there was overwhelmingly rejected by citizens, with just one in six downloading it.

Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie has called for the Scottish Government to publish a daily breakdown of coronavirus testing numbers by key sector, as is being done in countries such a Cyprus. He said: ‘This transparency would give people confidence.

‘It would tell us if the tracing is working, how many repatriated people or visitors are bringing the virus into the country, if retail and construction sites are putting workers at risk as we lift lockdown, and if schools are safe.’

It emerged this week the Scottish Government has not yet recruited any contact tracers despite its new strategy to test, trace and isolate cases as a way out of lockdown.

About 8,500 people applied for the 2,000 roles as data analysts, call handlers and health protection nurses since the plan was announced at the beginning of the month.

Meanwhile, courts in Scotland will soon be able to recover fines aimed at supporting police officer victims of assaults directly from the offenders’ benefit payments.

Under restitution orders, courts can make offenders who assault police pay to support specialist services which help officers recover, such as psychological support.

The Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Act 2014 (Consequential Modification) Order 2020 allows for money to be taken from offenders’ benefit payments if they are unable to pay with their own funds.

The change was requested by the Scottish parliament as benefits policy is a matter reserved to Westminster.

In the Commons, Scotland minister Douglas Ross said: ‘Behind this important order today are police officers and staff who are unacceptably being attacked in Scotland.’

He said in the first three weeks of lockdown, police recorded more than 100 coronavirus-related attacks and threats aimed at officers.

‘It would tell us if schools are safe’