Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 18 June 2020
I will first address Richard Leonard’s three points on guarantees. First, when we take the decision to move from one phase to another, we publish the analysis of the evidence that that is based on. That analysis will be published early tomorrow and so be available for people to read, scrutinise and ask questions about. Secondly, test and protect is up and running and is working. The biggest challenge for us now is to ensure that every member of the public knows about test and protect, what to do when they have symptoms, where to go to book a test and what to do around self-isolation. When people are contacted to tell them that they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive, they need to know where to go for support in order that they can self-isolate.
There is a campaign behind that and, over the next week or so, information will go out to every household in the country, telling people exactly what to do in those circumstances. Every member of the Scottish Parliament has a responsibility to help in that task. The testing capacity is there, the contact tracing capacity is there and the support for those who are required to isolate is there. That is part of the big challenge that we face in the weeks ahead.
We are expanding routine testing. The figures that Richard Leonard gives on the testing of care home staff are just wrong. The latest figure is that 22,500 staff have been tested through national health service laboratories. Additional staff will have been tested by drive-through centres. That represents a significant proportion of care staff. We will be doing that testing regularly. Further consideration will be given to other groups. Testing will have a role to play in getting parts of our society back to normal.
Lastly, on the issue of visits to care homes, the route map update that we are publishing today says that we will give further consideration to that and will then set out when visiting on a normal basis can resume. It is likely that that will start with visiting outdoors. However, our clinical advice is that we must take great care in that. The number of cases of coronavirus in care homes is reducing, the number of deaths is, thankfully, reducing and the number of care homes with outbreaks is reducing. However, given the experience that we have had in care homes, we want to tread very cautiously. I remind people watching this that there are already arrangements in place for visiting in end-of-life situations and, as I talked about yesterday in the chamber, other exceptional circumstances. We will therefore continue to take great care as we navigate through all these things.
In all this, I believe, as I think I said the first time I stood in the chamber and addressed the matter, that proper, robust scrutiny is very important for the Government as well as for everybody else. However, what I will not be swayed by, in any aspect of this, is the normal political to-ing and fro-ing. I have the biggest responsibility that I have ever had in facing the current situation and I am determined to do the right things in the best way and at the right pace to get the country through the crisis.