Leonard: Scotland fighting virus ‘with one arm behind its back’

The S cottish Lab our leader raised questions about S cotland's test and protect system, claiming it was not being fully utilised to find cases of coronavirus.

At First Minister's Questions, he said statistics for the last four weeks appeared to show Scotland had fewer tests per 100,000 p eople than anywhere else in the UK and quoted Scottish Government Covid advisor, Professor Mark Woolhouse, who said “we are currently only finding half, or even less than half of the cases – this is like fighting the epidemic with one arm behind our back”.

M r L e o n a r d s a i d f i g u r e s showed that in the week ending January 11, England had completed 6065 Covid tests while

S cotland had just 2966, and asked when a roll out of communit y mass testing would start.

First Minister Nicola Sturg e o n s a i d t h e f i g u r e s we r e l i k e l y f r o m “d e m a n d - l e d ” testing schemes.

“T h e s e a r e p e o p l e w i t h s y mp t o ms g o i n g t o a d r ive t h r o u g h c e n t r e o r a mobi l e t e s t i n g u n i t o r o r d e r i n g a home test, and the reason the numbers going through that a r e l owe r i n S c o t l a n d t h a n other par ts of the UK is that i n S c o t l a n d , t h o u g h p r e va - l e n c e o f t h e v i r u s i s h i g h e r than we want it to be and rising, it’s lower than it is in other par ts of the UK,” she said.

"So in very simple terms that means there are fewer peo - ple with symptoms putting the demand on those tests and that’s why those figures show what Richard Leonard has set out and that's an impor tant point of detail to grasp.”

She said pilot schemes on asymptomatic testing had been carried out before Christmas, and the government was “looking at plans from local authorities to roll them out on a bigger scale” as well as taking a similar approach to industrial sites “to help with workforce containment”.

Mr Leonard also said that there had been confirmation by Public Health Scotland that “contact tracing of contacts has been primarily focused on SMS messages” in spite of a promise by Ms Sturgeon two months ago to ensure more contacts were spoken to directly, after thousands of the text messages had been “ghosted” by their recipients.

Ms Sturgeon replied: “Test and Protect is not just coping but it's doing extremely well.”