Dereliction not to test tourists for Covid-19

Sir, – As a Rosyth boy in the 1950s my summer holidays often involved bathing at a nearby beach at Port Laing.

Walking there via the south side of Inverkeithing Bay meant passing the remains of a fever hospital at Cruickness, called the “Lazaretto”.

All we knew from local lore was that it was used to quarantine sick sailors from foreign ports.

I later learned that it was one of two such buildings in Scotland replacing a hulk that formerly served the same purpose and was built in 1771, the creation of a famous architect, James Craig, who also designed

Edinburgh’s New Town.

It was last used to house victims of a cholera epidemic in 1832.

Later in life, in the 1960s I spent some years in the merchant navy and understood why quarantine was as necessary then, as it had been in olden times to prevent the spread of the plague or leprosy.

All the countries I visited, even in the third world, only granted “pratique”, that is clearance given an incoming ship by the health authority of a port, after compliance with quarantine regulations or on presentation of a clean bill of health.

Countries with, say, a yellow fever outbreak, didn’t want seamen such as me adding to their problems so we had to have up-to-date vaccination certificates for that disease and if we didn’t the port medical authorities would inoculate us before allowing us ashore.

When I saw how we in Scotland handled the Covid-19 outbreak in March of this year I was shocked to see that there were no health checks on planes arriving from Covid-19 hotspots such as Italy and Spain at Edinburgh Airport, no apparent health checks of crews disembarking into small tourist craft from cruise liners at anchor in the Forth and certainly no health checks on land for tourists from England, Wales or Ireland.

It is not inhospitable for a Scots government to screen tourists arriving here, in fact it is a dereliction of duty not to.

The fact that Scotland was a country of free and easy access must have had some bearing on the numbers of Scots lost to the pandemic?

Numbers, which, per capita, are right up there among the worst in the world.

Tom Minogue. Victoria Terrace, Dunfermline.