Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 March 2021
I thank the minister for the advance copy of her statement.
Scottish Labour has long called on the Government to take seriously the need for more testing, so I welcome much of what the minister has announced. The vaccine has been great news, but the experts are clear that the virus will be here for some time yet, so we need robust testing and tracing to find and isolate outbreaks.
The Scottish Government’s own Covid-19 advisory group has said that
“It would be desirable to test more people ... even if this increased test positivity”
and that that expanded testing and community testing could be “a game changer”. However, community testing is still too small in scale. Last week, fewer than 6,000 asymptomatic tests were carried out at community sites. They uncovered 155 positive cases. How many more are going undetected?
Does the minister accept that there is a need to expand community testing even further and to advertise it to local people, especially as restrictions lift? After all the effort to scale up Scotland’s testing capacity, why is the Government content to let more than 50,000 gold-standard PCR tests go unused every day, as asymptomatic cases go untested?
Finally, from November to January, only 30 per cent of self-isolation support grant applications were awarded. That is woeful, and I am worried that some people will refuse tests and not self-isolate as a result. It would be very helpful if the minister outlined what she will do urgently to rectify that problem.