The weekend is too nice to rain on so let’s enjoy our first baby steps in the sun

Beneath blue skies, Scotland’s doors creaked open a little further yesterday as we continued our first tentative steps into the sun after 10 long weeks of lockdown.

As parks and beaches filled with friends and families happily reunited, it was easy – and comforting – to think this might be the beginning of the end. If this is the new normal, we thought, it could be worse.

It is too nice a weekend to rain on but this is, of course, not even the beginning of the end. Yesterday, as government scientific advisers lined up to say our politicians, north and south of the border, might have jumped the gun on easing lockdown it became increasingly clear that it may not even be the end of the beginning.

The thing is, no one knows anything. Every small but hard-won discovery made by the world’s most gifted scientists and doctors only illuminates how much we have still to learn about Covid-19.

That is not necessarily the impression given at ministers’ daily briefings. When they are not “following the science”, they cloak themselves in numbers and graphs. Statistics, targets, tolls and tallies are pulled out of binders like magic rabbits but most, if not all, carry less import than their presentation would suggest.

What value, for example, has the fabled R number – the rate people infect others – if we are not doing enough tests to calculate it with certainty? This is the number, of course, which must, absolutely must, stay below one or we all head back into lockdown but at this point, in Scotland, it is based as much on guesswork as lab work.

The phased relaxations of lockdown are not really scientific decisions at all. The decisions will be coloured by political and scientific advice but ultimately they are personal judgments and the most important, the ones that might save or cost many lives, will be taken by our leaders.

That is why there remains a reservoir of goodwill for Nicola Sturgeon and – despite his and his chief adviser’s best efforts to drain it – Boris Johnson. Our leaders have a monumental responsibility, are working under huge pressure and scrutiny, and dealing with an unprecedented and international public health crisis.

There is increasing evidence to suggest, as we report today, that the best-laid plans to deal with this pandemic were nothing of the kind but, realistically, if anyone had a blueprint in their bottom drawer to deal with the current crisis, you would want them picking your lottery numbers.

Many Scots suffered unimaginable grief during lockdown, not only losing loved ones but enduring the rules of isolation, of unspoken goodbyes, empty chairs by hospital beds, and 10-strong funerals.

It’s been awful and those of us lucky enough to have been spared such loss must be guided by that as we edge forward, inch by inch, taking baby steps out of our homes and into the great unknown.

Stats are pulled out like magic rabbits