FM WARNS OVER
Sturgeon urges people not to expect festivals this summer
NICOLA STURGEON has said not to expect large scale outdoor events to take place this summer. The First Minister said that it is likely to be a longer wait.
She said: “If I’m asked will large scale events take place, the honest answer is no. I hope we will have restored a level of normality but we need to be realistic and pragmatic.”
She said it was likely we would have to wait longer than this summer.
The organisers of Glastonbury have cancelled the festival again this year but Geoff Ellis, the boss of the TRNSMT festival in Glasgow, had said he was hopeful it go co ahead as planned. Hampden is also due to host Euro 2021 football matches in June.
Ms Sturgeon said she hoped a return to normality that allows event to take place would be as quick as possible once the vaccination programme was rolled out but added: “But will it be this summer, I can’t say with any certainty.”
Another 71 deaths have been registered of someone who tested positive for coronavirus.
The latest update given by Nicola Sturgeon showed there had been another 1480 positive cases in Scotland and 427 were in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area.
Ms Sturgeon said the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 increased by 49 to 2013 and there were 161 people in intensive care units with Covid, the same number as the day before.
She revealed there had been a total of 358,454 people given the first dose of the vaccine. The number meant that another 23,583 people have been vaccinated in the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Ms Sturgeon said future generations will learn from the lessons that emerge regarding the Government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The First Minister insisted that as Scotland, and other countries, remain in the grip of the crisis, her Government is focused for now on dealing with it.
But she also stressed the importance of learning from what has happened in the 10 months since coronavirus arrived in Scotland last March.
The Scottish Government has come under fire over some of the decisions it has made – such as transferring elderly patients from hospital to care homes in the early part of the pandemic without first testing them for Covid.
Ms Sturgeon said: “We’ve got things wrong, and I have tried never to shy away from this. Some of that will be relatively small things in the grand scheme of things, some of that might be bigger.”
She said the Scottish Government had been planning for something akin to a flu pandemic when coronavirus first emerged, but she conceded it quickly became apparent that Covid “is very different to flu”.
She added: “If I knew then what I know now, there are some things I would have done differently. Perhaps testing in care homes being one of those.
“But I didn’t know then what I know now, and therefore if I was to turn the clock back I would do the same things because we were acting on what we knew then.
“This is something that is really important to me. I want to make sure we learn properly from this. I hope that our generation will never, ever have to go through a global pandemic again, but sooner or later some generation will.
“And therefore it is important that we learn lessons now so that we are leaving those for the benefit of those who come after us.”