Covid caution

Your headline article in the Saturday, 11 July edition is a welcome piece of optimism in this pandemic-struck world.

However, despite the enthusiasm of your article I would suggest a word of caution. The testing statistics for Scotland advise a total of around 290,000 tests carried out to date, which is around 5.5 per cent of the population.

Public Health England have carried out over 8,200,000 tests, which is around 14 percent of their population. Many of the UK population are also asymptomatic and as such will not present for testing.

I would therefore contend that the true Covid-19 infection rate in Scotland is much less clear than your article suggests, because the amount of testing being carried out is nowhere near as large as that being carried out south of the Border.

Until such time as we get to the levels of testing carried out as in the state of Victoria, Australia, for example: 1.2 million tests of a population of 6.3 million which is heading towards 20 per cent, then we should all continue to be very very careful indeed.

ARCHIE BURLEIGH

Meigle, Skelmorlie

As a virologist and someone with a bit of experience of outbreak investigation, I think that it is too soon to make any meaningful claims about the comparative efficacy of Covid -19 controls in scotland such as those being made by Gill Turner (Letters, 10 July).

Lockdown was imposed in a hurry and most measures, though not unreasonable, didn’t have a strong evidence base regarding their ability to stop virus transmission, so abandoning them is being done on a suck-it-and-see basis.

I note that the case number increase of 18 announced on Friday is greater than the most recent daily increases recorded in countries with which we

often compare ourselves; 12 new cases in Denmark, 11 in Norway and three in Finland.

HUGH PENNINGTON Carlton Place, Aberdeen