Forget Covid ...Sturgeon’s eliminating all our hopes

COME with me, if you will, to the hallowed ground that is Holyrood’s Covid-19 Committee, where the First Minister this week finally set out her stall for her grand plan regarding Scotland’s coronavirus strategy.

No dates, obviously. No roadmap either. Instead, what we heard about was her scheme to eliminate Covid-19. That’s right. Not suppress. Not manage. Eliminate.

‘With a virus like this, what you absolutely can’t do is just say we’re going to let it simmer at this medium level, like a gently simmering pot,’ Nicola Sturgeon told the committee.

‘You have to have an approach, in my view, where our objective has to be to eliminate.’

That virologists up and down the country believe that ‘eliminating’ Covid-19 is nothing more than a pipe dream seems scarcely to matter to the First Minister.

Just two weeks ago Bristol University virologist Dr David Matthews, member of a specialist team which has been studying the coronavirus for a combined 20 years, practically cracked up laughing when asked about the chances of elimination.

‘There’s no chance of eliminating this virus,’ he said. ‘That’s it... your chances of eliminating it are pretty much nil.’

So why does Miss Sturgeon believe differently? Is it terrible to say that part of me wonders whether she wants to present herself as a sort of pound shop version of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, achieving what many other nations cannot with a winning smile and a hefty dose of global admiration?

OR that it may, to some extent, be about one in the eye for Westminster, which is now trotting down the scientist-supported route of ‘we need to learn to live with this?’ Perhaps it even has something to do with her repeated claim that last summer Scotland was ‘close’ to eliminating the virus – a statement shot down by Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University, who told the committee that the number of positive coronavirus cases never fell below 500.

I’d like to think not. Some things, after all, should be above politics.

But, whatever her reasons, Miss Sturgeon’s zero-Covid policy could spell disaster for Scotland.

Think, for example, of the hospitality sector, battered and beleaguered, facing a return – still weeks away – to the levels system, which will put hefty curfews on opening hours and, in some cases, a ban on the serving of alcohol.

Of our tourism industry, almost eradicated in the past year, finding it ever more difficult to lure people to Scotland when the Government’s message appears very much to lean along the lines of ‘keep out’.

Of our university students, facing the possibility of a second year of remote, online learning, all normal student experiences eradicated, their lives – as with so many of us who have been working at home for the past year – conducted virtually.

Last month, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Scots that, just like the rest of the UK, we would have to learn to live with the virus.

‘Sadly, this disease has now become entirely endemic around the whole world and so it is not possible to eliminate it entirely,’ he said. ‘You can’t end international travel for ever and, as an open trading nation, that is just not possible for the UK.’ No indeed.

Do we really want the sort of situation New Zealand and Australia, which have both attempted zeroCovid strategies, find themselves in, where entire cities are locked down because of just one or two cases? Most of us, I suspect, do not. Because perhaps the most difficult thing about this policy is that Miss Sturgeon is also eliminating hope. While we see our neighbours in England with dates already in the diary for opening up, and hardnosed assessments about what living with the virus in the long term in conjunction with the vaccine might look like, those of us north of the Border feel left in the dust.

No plans can be made. There is little to look forward to. Instead, the future feels gloomy and unknowable, any return to normal life left tantalisingly out of reach.

Miss Sturgeon seems committed to her elimination policy. But has she really asked herself what else she will eliminate along with it?