YOU CAN’T PLAY THE PATIENT PRIVACY CARD IN A PANDEMIC

FIRST let’s cut them some slack. The decision not to make public the details of the Covid-19 outbreak at the Hilton Carlton hotel in Edinburgh in late February was made when the planet was a different world from the one in which we now live.

Italy was not yet in lockdown. Nicola Sturgeon had other things on her mind, such as GP numbers and school exam results (both raised at First Minister’s Questions that week). The Salmond trial in Edinburgh was on its way.

Nobody was yet talking about the need to build hospitals or shut down the economy. It’s easy to see why ministers perhaps didn’t think it necessary to send out a distress call that might have sent the country into panic.

Yet, even with that yard of slack – and with the benefit of hindsight – the hard truth is that the decision not to inform the public about the outbreak in Edinburgh illustrates how slow ministers were, in Scotland and the UK, in responding adequately at the start of this pandemic.

Yesterday, Miss Sturgeon insisted it was not a ‘cover-up’ but because of ‘patient confidentiality’ concerns.

The fear was that if the Government passed on information about the location of the outbreak it ‘could potentially have identified the patients concerned’. Let’s assume that was indeed a genuine concern for health authorities.

BUT given what we now know about the spread of Covid-19 and the impact it has on society, those concerns now seem almost comically quaint. Contrast the Scottish Government’s response in early March to that of authorities in South Korea at the weekend, when 2,100 bars and nightclubs were shut in the capital, Seoul, after new cases were linked to an infected 29-year old man who visited three clubs in the city’s Itaewon district.

No one appears too worried about this man’s confidentiality. That is because we have all learnt that the grave risk of death and economic catastrophe to society from Covid-19 far outweighs one individual’s right to a quiet life.

There are two problems that this episode brings to the surface for the Scottish Government.

Firstly, it adds to the growing sense that this is a political operation that defaults too often towards keeping information private, rather than offering it up.

Last November, we learnt a child had died at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. We then discovered that Health Secretary Jeane Freeman had known for two months. The reason for not saying anything? ‘Patient confidentiality.’

Doubtless, this was a factor in deciding whether or not to open up. But, fairly or otherwise, it often appears that this Scottish Government has a presumption towards managing difficult news privately, rather than explaining it in public. This does it no good when – as almost always happens – it comes out anyway.

Secondly, and more importantly, this story only adds to the sense that – as with the UK Government – the Scottish Government did not act with the necessary urgency when it really mattered at the start of this crisis.

We are right to ask what might have been. Had there been a public announcement of the outbreak in the hotel, more guests might have come forward to be tested.

That might have identified people who were infected who could then have been stopped from going out. That, in turn, might have prevented others from getting the disease.

Instead, we are left to wonder how many people have now been infected from this one source.

And the really worrying question is whether anything is getting any better. BBC Scotland’s reporters said they spoke to one guest who had been staying at the Hilton hotel during the Nike conference – and who had close contact with their delegates.

The guest says they have still not been contact-traced by anyone from NHS Scotland.

This is deeply worrying. It points up the inadequacy of the Scottish Government’s tracking and testing regime.

THE problem isn’t just that we will never know about the extent of the spread from the Hilton Carlton. It’s that – two months on – we still don’t have a proper contact tracing and testing regime in place.

More than 2,500 tests were carried out by NHS Scotland in hospitals, care homes and the community on Monday. Compare that with plans in Wuhan, China, to test all 11million citizens within the next ten days.

It’s utterly inadequate and will not give health chiefs the opportunity to get ahead of the disease if and when hotspots emerge.

Hindsight is a great thing. Few governments saw this coming.

But now it’s here, those same governments have no excuses not to act. Sadly, we still don’t seem to have learnt lessons from the early days of this crisis.