Article in the times today, quite the most depressing thing I’ve read recently 😭
CORONAVIRUS
Covid in Scotland: We will have to get used to stricter lockdowns, expert warns
Helen Puttick, Scottish Health Correspondent
Wednesday March 03 2021, 5.00pm, The Times
Communities across Scotland must prepare for cities and towns to be shut down in future if even one family tests positive for the coronavirus, an expert has said.
Professor James Chalmers, a respiratory physician at Dundee University, has said that Scotland should follow countries such as New Zealand, where Auckland effectively re-entered lockdown after three new cases were diagnosed.
Chalmers, who has studied antibody levels for Covid-19 in Scotland, said that the population had “got used to having very high levels” of the virus circulating, with shops and restaurants staying open.
He said as Scotland emerges from the second wave of the virus and adopts World Health Organisation advice on the number of cases allowed in each tier of its restrictions system, people will find that they are subject to stricter rules with even small increases in infections.
Last month the Australian state of Victoria was sent into lockdown, with schools closed and travel banned, after 13 cases were found relating to a quarantine worker at a Melbourne hotel.
Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand , ordered Auckland into lockdown in February when a mother, father and daughter tested positive.
Chalmers noted that people were allowed to eat out in Scotland in the autumn, when the numbers of infections were far higher. “We were tolerating levels of the virus circulating that we are clearly not going to tolerate now,” he said. “Getting peoples’ head on the road to an Australia or New Zealand mindset is going to be kind of difficult. They are going to say, ‘last year I could go to a restaurant’.”
Scotland is due to return to a tier system, in which restrictions reflect the prevalence of the virus in different regions of the country, on Monday April 26.
Following the WHO guidance means that areas, potentially council areas, will be placed in the highest tier known, Level 4, if they have more than 150 cases per 100,000 people. The previous threshold for such tough restrictions was 300.
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To drop down to Level 2 areas will have to record fewer than 50 cases per 100,000. Last year areas with 75 to 150 infections were in Level 2, and pubs could serve alcohol and residents could travel further afield.
Chalmers noted that by the old measures, much of Scotland would now qualify for Level 1 freedoms, including indoor socialising, with Aberdeen, Dumfries and Galloway, Highland and Borders all registering fewer than 50 infections per 100,000. However, as the new system states level one areas should have fewer than 20 cases, they would no longer meet the criteria.
“The WHO system means it should not take many cases to go up a tier,” he said. If “Aberdeen got an outbreak or surge in cases they would very quickly go back into a lockdown. People will think, we had this number of cases last year and we did not do anything.”
At the Scottish government Covid-19 briefing today Dr Gregor Smith, Scotland’s chief medical officer, noted that the present WHO tiers took into account the emergence of new more transmissible strains of the virus. “I think there is a lot of sense in the way the WHO has articulated their current metrics in order that we continue a sustained control of the virus.”
Jeane Freeman, the Scottish health secretary, said that when Scotland returned to a tier system at the end of April it was anticipated there would be significantly less virus circulating, allowing people to live under much fewer restrictions. These would be reduced further, she said, as the evidence allowed the nation to move forward.