Time to take Covid-19 testing door to door?

Sir, – In just over a week, we have gone from no cases in Grampian at all to having 250,000 people locked down again.

The implication of the lockdown is that, in this time, the virus has already spread in such a way that the much heralded Scottish Track and Trace system has not been able to keep up with it.

On the BBC Scotland news programme, presenter Rebecca

Curran made the astute observation that the number of contacts traced were only three times the number of cases, and this included family members living with them.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has suggested that for an effective Track and Trace system, your contacts need to be at least ten times the number of cases.

It is 30 times the number for a more aggressive approach.

Our approach seems to have been good enough to catch up with the Lanarkshire cluster, but not this one.

I note the Glasgow figures yesterday were the highest they have been for over two months.

We don’t want them locked down as well, so the Scottish Government need to step this up and give people some confidence that they are capable of dealing with a challenge like this.

From a historical perspective, I note that the 1919 Spanish Flu came back again in the first week of August. We don’t want to let that happen again now.

We need to be seeing people going door to door with testing kits in Aberdeen like they did in Leicester. That seemed to help get on top of things quickly there. Victor Clements. Mamie’s Cottage, Aberfeldy.