Covid alert level falls across Scotland
The UK’S four chief medical officers have agreed the Covid-19 alert level should be lowered from five – its highest – down to four as the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed within 21 days “has receded”.
The Level 5 alert was announced on January 4 as lockdown measures were introduced by Boris Johnson amid fears the health service could be swamped within 21 days.
The decision to reduce the alert to Level Four has now been made by the UK’S four chief medical officers and NHS England’s medical director because the number of cases in hospital are “consistently declining”.
Scotland’s Dr Gregor Smith, England’s Professor Chris Whitty, Northern Ireland’s Dr Michael Mcbride, Wales’s Dr Frank Atherton and NHS England’s Professor Stephen Powis announced the decision yesterday following advice from the Joint Biosecurity Centre.
They said health services across the four nations “remain under significant pressure with a high number of patients in hospital”, but thanks to the efforts of the public numbers are now “consistently declining, and the threat of the NHS and other health services being overwhelmed within 21 days has receded”.
They added: “We should be under no illusions – transmission rates, hospital pressures and deaths are still very high.
“In time, the vaccines will have a major impact and we encourage everyone to get vaccinated when they receive the offer.
“However for the time being it is really important that we all – vaccinated or not – remain vigilant and continue to follow the guidelines.”
Howeveer, one of the Scottish Government’s scientific advisers has warned that Scotland has "never been close” to eliminating coronavirus,
Speaking at Holyrood’s Covid-19 committee, Professor Mark Woolhouse, chair of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said that Scotland was not close to eliminating the virus at any point in the epidemic due to a high level of cases going undetected in the community, even during the summer months when only a handful of cases a day were officially being reported.
Professor Woolhouse also warned that cases of the new dominant UK variant of coronavirus have hardly declined at all during lockdown, that the drop in cases north of the Border was mainly attributable to a fall in cases of the old variant, while the number of cases of the new, socalled “Kent” variant, had “held steady”. Prof Woolhouse said: “Scotland was not close to elimination at any stage during this epidemic. We had low numbers of reported cases during the summer. But at the same time, the modelling groups were estimating the number of cases present.”
He said modelling suggested that the actual number of cases was far higher.
He said: “The estimates were that we never fell below 500 cases. More difficult still, the majority of those cases, perhaps 90 per cent of them, were not reported.
"Andthereasonforthat,isthe virus at that stage was circulated particularly in young adult groups that don't show them any symptoms. As soon as the testing capacity increased in August, there was a dramatic increase in the number of cases we were detecting in those same groups.”
He said that driving down levels to elimination level of the new variant, which now accounts for 85 per cent of cases in Scotland, through lockdown, would be very difficult.
He said: “I'm not clear how we could achieve that, we're not. We're barely driving it down at all.”
He added: “The epidemiological situation in Scotland right now is quite delicate and complex, the reduction in cases that we've all seen over the last few weeks is mostly a reduction in the old variants. The new variant has more or less held steady, it has declined slightly, but it's more or less held steady.
"This was something I was very concerned about when I was first alerted to the new variant back in December, that it was actually going to be extremely difficult to suppress this variant due to lockdown. And we said at the time that it was right on a knife edge, whether we can do it or not. That, that's exactly what we're seeing now in the data.”
He also insisted that Scotland could not achieve a full elimination like New Zealand due to the early seeding of the virus in the country.
Appearing at the committee alongside Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago in Wellington, Prof Woolhouse said that New Zealand had been in a “fortunate” position of having only a few cases in the country when it went into strict lockdown in March – two days after Scotland and the rest of the UK.
“The UK epidemic was seeded in late February by large numbers of cases, thousands of cases, being brought infromfrance,italyandspain. So, even if we put border closure measures in place when New Zealand did it would have had very little effect and would have been much too late. Their epidemic was seeded behind the UK.”
He said his team’s analysis showed that less than half the cases in Scotland are still not being identified.
Prof Baker said: “We [in New Zealand] had a slight timing advantage but it wasn't profound. And, I think, unfortunately, the World Health Organisation was telling us too much. They were saying, keep your borders open, take lockdowns as a last resort, and save masks for those who need them. In the end we just did the opposite of what the WHO was recommending. I think most western countries got it so wrong at that point.”