Lothian under no immediate threat of renewed lockdown

Edinburgh is unlikely to face a local lock down similar to that in Glasgow in the coming days after the Scottish Government’s national clinical director said the case numbers in the NHS Lothian health board were “behaving well”.

The comments came after more than one million peo - ple were put under renewed restrictions in the west of Scotland after cases in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board area continued to rise.

NHS Lothian has been around third place on the list of the highest case numbers for the last week and has seen consistent double figures in new cases per day, the first time since May.

The health board saw a rise of 18 cases today, Nicola Sturgeon confirmed.

However, numbers are not rising sharply and Professor Leitch said that while there were cases, the area was simply experiencing the cases that existed in the area, rather than having serious outbreaks.

At the Scottish Government’s daily corona virus briefing, he said: “Although no positive case is a good thing and we worry about ever y single case, I would rather eliminate this virus if we possibly could, Lothian is be having well.

“Test and Protect is functioning well, the testing capacity is good, there are no significant out breaks, there are small pockets, there is no pattern that has reached our level.

“There’s been no theme that Test and Protect have said, look, we need you to be care - ful because this set of hospitality or this set of homes or house parties.

“There have been the typical things we’ve seen around the rest of the country, too many house gatherings and house parties and you saw a very high profile one last weekend that the police publicly talked about where people have been arrested as a result of it.”