Visitors allowed in care homes as lockdown eases
Regular visiting will resume in Scottish care homes from early March, with residents allowed to have two designated visitors each, ministers confirmed yesterday.
The move comes as Nicola Sturgeon prepares to detail the roadmap out of lockdown on Tuesday.
Relatives of care home residents have campaigned for visits to resume and, as the vaccine programme rolls out, designated visitors, who will be urged to be tested on-site and will wear PPE, will soon be able to see their relatives once a week.
Data released last week showed care home coronavirus deaths had fallen by 62% in the last three weeks, with the figure cited by the first minister as the earliest “hard evidence” of the vaccine’s impact.
Almost all residents have received the jag, along with 92% of care home staff and the government says
that with the extra protection in place, the greater risk to residents’ wellbeing is from a lack of family contact.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce his plan to ease lockdown in England tomorrow.
A further 29 Covid-19 deaths were recorded yesterday in Scotland, taking the death toll to 6,945. There were 1,154 Covid patients in hospital, with 102 in intensive care. Official figures also show 803 new cases, with test positivity rate of 4.6%.
The vaccine rollout has slowed due to short-term supply issues but data shows 1,412,643 have now had a first dose.
We had deprioritised and disinvested in public health for some time and we were just not ready for a pandemic.
In Scotland, public health is part of the NHS but it sits as departments. They are really quite small teams.
We did not have a contact tracing infrastructure ready to go. We did not recognise that we would need a testing infrastructure early enough.
We have deprioritised public health generally, compared to nice hospital equipment and hospital buildings.
We have also learned that we have a population that is vulnerable because of lots of chronic disease such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes. There is speculation that one of the reasons the UK’S excess mortality is so high compared to our European neighbours is because of non-communicable diseases.
We just have poor health in this country, particularly in Scotland.
In future, communicable diseases such as Covid and non-communicable diseases need to be regarded as equally important.