PROFESSOR Devi Sridhar has said Scotland “has a chance” in its fight against coronavirus if it moves away from Westminster’s approach and begins to act locally.
Speaking to ITV’s Peter A Smith, Sridhar argued that smaller countries around the world have fared better against Covid-19.
For the broadcaster’s podcast, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh spoke of how all world leaders saw the same science on the virus but the UK Government chose to respond differently from others and explained that the new normal could mean sacrificing some privacy and patient confidentiality.
Scotland has already diverged from the UK Government on some matters – Nicola Sturgeon announced school closures ahead of the Prime Minister, and recommended wearing face coverings in some public spaces before Westminster adopted the guidance.
Devi’s assessment is “Scotland has a chance,” but the best way forward from a scientific perspective is to deviate from UK policy and ‘act local.’ She sees the Scottish islands as ‘low hanging fruit’ for an effective Test Trace Isolate programme that can get kids back to school. pic.twitter.com/aRjqUeEmn6
— Peter A Smith (@PeterAdamSmith) May 15, 2020
Now, Scotland, like Wales and Northern Ireland, has a different public messaging campaign on the virus – the Government is still urging people to Stay at Home, while some people in England have gone back to work and other restrictions have been eased.
But Sridhar told Smith that Scotland could go further. She said: “Scotland has a chance. I think we really do.
“We are a small country, we don’t have a city like Seoul of over 10 million people, we don’t have London, we are … smaller countries have tended to do better.
“We have a lot of rural areas, we have islands, there are a lot of places you could start as low-hanging fruit and start testing people, get tracing up and going and actually get those communities back up again. Get kids back in school, because you can say it’s safe.
“We know there’s a handful of cases in the Borders, there’s no point shutting down everyone there. So I think we have a chance, I think the whole of the UK is going to struggle.”
As of yesterday afternoon, Scotland had 14,117 confirmed cases of coronavirus – but the true figure is thought to be higher.
Of the patients who had tested positive for the virus, 2007 have died.
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