Hansard

On 24 April, I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport and said that I considered routine testing for hospital and care workers who were on the front line of the Covid-19 pandemic to be an urgent imperative, and I still do. At the time, I pointed to a paper published in The Lancet that set out the case for screening of health and care workers to prevent transmission, which confirmed that University College London hospital was piloting such testing to

“further limit nosocomial transmission and ... alleviate a critical source of anxiety for HCWs.”

It said:

“A healthy, COVID-19-free workforce that is not burned out will be an asset to the prolonged response to the COVID-19 crisis.”

What an asset our health and care workforce is.

It was right that we loudly applauded the efforts of our health and care workers from our doorsteps, but we must do much more. We should, of course, pay those hard-working people more and, as I said last week in the chamber, we owe them the protection that testing provides.

This week, NHS England has made testing available to all patient-facing staff. Staff will receive home kits to test themselves twice a week. Although those lateral flow tests have a lower specificity, all positive results will be checked with a PCR test, as the Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science announced will be the case regarding students.

I wrote to the First Minister on 14 May, when I pointed to Imperial College London research that advised that regular screening of health and care workers, irrespective of symptoms, could prevent up to a third of transmission. Reducing transmission by a third is huge. It is no surprise that our proposal to test health and care staff enjoys widespread support, including from the Royal College of Nursing, Scottish Care and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. Yet only last week, the First Minister said:

“the top priority for our testing capacity right now is people with symptoms, because that is how we ... break chains of transmission.”—[Official Report, 5 November 2020; c 11.]

However, that chain might have started with an asymptomatic carrier of Covid. We have known for months about the dangers of asymptomatic transmission, but we are still waiting for the virus to come to us.

Mark Woolhouse, the professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said in the press this week that we are still not finding out about half of the Covid cases in Scotland or the UK more generally, and that

“it’s like trying to control the epidemic with one hand tied behind our back.”

He welcomed the testing pilot in Liverpool that seeks to solve that problem. Slovakia tested two thirds of its population in two days. When I raised that last week, the First Minister said that the testing in Slovakia was antibody testing. That is not the case; it is antigen testing.

It is true that we should question the specificity and sensitivity of tests, but we must also question why Scotland seems so very unambitious when it comes to testing. I have asked many times for increased testing for those on the front line and more broadly.

I wrote to the First Minister on the issue of mass testing in September, when I cited the availability of quick turnaround, low-cost tests. The technology is improving, but our testing numbers are not. In fact, the total number of daily tests that are carried out in Scotland has barely changed since the end of August. A frequent response is that the Government is prioritising its testing capacity, so let us look at that. The Scottish Government aims to expand its overall testing capacity to 65,000 tests per day by winter, but in the past week Scotland processed an average of only 18,700 tests per day. Yesterday, 10,499 tests were processed.

Scotland has been too slow to implement the level of testing that is needed. Although routine testing for care home staff was introduced on 25 May, routine testing is still not available for staff in far too many settings including, as our briefings for today’s debate from the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland, Cancer Research UK and Scottish Care confirm, those in home care, those who support people with no homes or who are dealing with addiction issues, and staff who are involved in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

I said it last week and I say it again: here we are in November, and someone could still be working in a Scottish hospital with Covid-19 and not even know it. It is unacceptable for those staff, the families they return home to and the patients they look after. I hope that the issue will be progressed at a pace that has been sorely lacking up to this point.