WE could be dancing in the streets again to see out the Old Year, mingling, listening to bands, exchanging kisses and toasting the New Year. Dr Hugh Pennington, Scotland’s leading bacteriologist, today tells the Sunday National how Scotland is winning the fight against Covid-19 and there are signs that we could be enjoying the Hogmanay party to end all Hogmanay parties.

Dr Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, has praised the Scottish Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

“If the policy of eliminating the virus is successful and before Christmas the ‘R’ rate gets to near zero, particularly in Scotland, as it is showing signs of, then that is feasible.

“It’s what the Scottish Government want.

“If the UK was able to find itself in a position where they could say we’ve got rid of it like New Zealand, we could then go back to normal life; to having parties, gathering as we used to and singing again. Of course we would need a good testing regime, but yes, we could get back on with ordinary life again as we used to know it.”

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“All things being equal, it is possible with Contact and Trace, and it would be good if we could say goodbye to this year with an end-of-virus Hogmanay.”

Pennington has been following closely the pursuit of a vaccine which has been gathering pace with a Cold War race between Russia and the USA.

Russia has been accused of trying to hack Oxford University and Imperial College research, with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab calling out Vladimir Putin last week.

Pennington, though, believes that there is little to fear from the Russians. “I’d be surprised that they’d be bothered stealing it.

“The information needs to be and will be in the public domain. It’s not a secret, although maybe some of the manufacturing details might be secret. And people know the protocol.

“Maybe they want to steal that information to speed up the vaccine but this is probably more about prestige for Russia.

“I see it as similar with the development of the atom bomb. Everybody knew how to make it in principle.

“And besides, Russia doesn’t have a particularly great record of discovering antibiotics and vaccines.

“I wouldn’t be worried about Russia, I’d be more worried about America buying up all the supplies of remdesivir [which has been proven to help recovery from Covid-19]. That’s par for the course for Donald Trump.

“His people come first and to hell with the rest.”

Scots have been front and centre in the discovery and research of vaccines that have saved millions of lives throughout recent history since Alexander Fleming set us on the path in giving us penicillin in the 1920s.

Pennington sees a future in this country in which we take a two-prong approach to the virus beyond our borders, which puts access to supplies of a vaccine and protects us from infection from citizens of countries with the infection to the forefront.

The urgency to put the right checks and balances in place has been further highlighted by alarming figures over the weekend from the World Health Organisation. There has been an increase of 237,743 cases globally from Friday to yesterday, with India’s caseload topping one million and only the USA and Brazil reporting more infections.

And Johns Hopkins University reports that more than 13.7 million have been diagnosed with Covid-19 with more than 7.7 million recovering and 588,000 fatalities.

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“Who knows what will happen around the world in North and South America and in Africa, in India, in South Africa and Nigeria, for example,” Pennington said. He stresses the importance too of a check system for visitors to this island. ‘‘We would need people coming into this country being able to show a certificate to say that they were free of Covid-19 and might need to operate a quarantine system.”

Pennington warns though that while he is optimistic about us emerging from the virus through the winter, we should be prepared for coronaviruses as a spectre in our lives in the future.

“We might see other coronaviruses in the future. This is the third which we have seen in recent times but it is the one that has taken off worldwide.

“The next one may be caused by influenza. Who knows what will happen in the future?

‘‘This coronavirus certainly took us by surprise as a country and the next one might too.

“It might behave differently than this one has done.

‘But the experience of the last six months has made us learn a lot of lessons which we can use if we have to face another coronavirus again.’’