PEOPLE ‘JUST CAN’T BE TRUSTED’

Families won’t ‘behave’ if rules are eased, top adviser claims

SCOTS are being prevented from visiting their families because they cannot be trusted to ‘behave appropriately’, according to Scotland’s national clinical director.

Professor Jason Leitch yesterday said the ‘individual risk’ to people visiting their relatives was very small – if they maintained social distancing.

But he claimed that lifting restrictions and allowing all five million Scots to socialise with their close family would lead to a surge in deaths.

People across the UK have been unable to visit relatives for nearly nine weeks since lockdown rules were introduced.

Despite previous discussion on allowing socialising in small ‘bubbles’ of family and close friends, this has yet to happen.

South of the Border, people have been told they can meet up with one relative a day at an outdoor location if they stay two metres apart.

Despite Nicola Sturgeon saying she wanted to engage in a ‘grown up conversation’ with the nation, meetings of this kind are still banned in Scotland. SNP ministers have failed to provide any clarity on when people may be allowed to see loved ones who live in different households.

Professor Leitch was answering questions on Bauer radio stations when one caller asked why she was allowed to stand in a supermarket two metres away from a stranger, but she could not do the same with her family.

Professor Leitch said this is because people can only leave their homes for ‘essential reasons’ such as buying food or caring for the elderly.

He added: ‘If we let the whole population go out, meet their families, go to the cafes, do these things, then population health will suffer and people will die.

‘In the next few weeks, we are hopeful, if the numbers stay where they are, the population does as it is doing just now, we will be able to release more and then more, and then more.’

After being asked if he did not trust the public’s ‘common sense’, Professor Leitch said: ‘I don’t trust the whole population to behave appropriately. So you have to think about it at a five-million person level, not at an individual caller or correspondent level. It’s so hard.’

Explaining his theory, Professor Leitch said: ‘The health minister in New Zealand got in trouble for visiting the beach. He went to the beach by himself.

‘Nothing happened... the individual risk for him, almost zero.

‘If you let everybody in New Zealand go to the beach, people die.’

But hours after making the comments, Professor Leitch appeared to perform a U-turn, telling the Scottish Government’s daily briefing that he does trust the people of Scotland. He said that he had been giving advice on personal versus population risk. His apparent change of view came after the First Minister said she has ‘huge trust and huge faith’ in the public.

Speaking at her daily briefing on the pandemic, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘I do trust the Scottish population, and I think the way the Scottish population has behaved thus far would suggest you are wanting to do the right thing and actually have done the right thing, which is why we are seeing things go in the right direction.

‘All of our decisions now are based on judgments on what is safe to do and what is required to keep the whole population safe, and that is what will continue to guide us.

‘I do have huge trust and huge faith in the Scottish population around this.’

Professor Leitch said: ‘I do trust the population and I think I have evidence for that trust. The trust is that the numbers have fallen, the population has behaved as the guidelines said.’

He claimed that his earlier comments on the radio had been a ‘kind of tutorial on epidemiology’.

Professor Leitch said: ‘It was the difference between an individual taking an asthma inhaler to look after themselves and a populationbased approach to save lives across a whole population.

‘We need the population to do things in order to save all of us, rather than take a paracetamol to deal with their own headache.’

He added: ‘I do trust the population, however we need to keep that going.’

‘Health will suffer and people will die’