There is a sense of despair running through Scottish communities as new Covid restrictions come into force. Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement last week that all household contacts of any confirmed case of the virus must isolate for ten days, regardless of their vaccination status and even if they initially return a negative PCR test, has had ramifications. When, on top of this, the advice is to cancel Christmas parties, the impact on the hospitality sector is clearly devastating. Some businesses are reporting a 25 to 30 per cent drop in trade.
It is not just pubs, restaurants and nightclubs that are affected, it is also business meetings and conferences, office working and group activities, to say nothing of family get-togethers, anything where close contact is involved. Foreign travel plans will have to be reconsidered, since a potential ten-day isolation period carries financial implications for most people and companies. The economic impact will be felt well into the new year.
The new rule may seem an extreme reaction: if a double vaccination and a booster, together with a negative PCR test is not sufficient protection for an individual who happens to have been in a group where there has been one infection, the inevitable outcome will be to question the validity of the jabs and the tests. Sturgeon wants to see every adult in the country offered a booster by Hogmanay. Telling them at the same time that this will not be protection enough may take the edge off her message.
Today we will see more as Sturgeon announces the next round of restrictions. Extra measures are inevitable, according to the health secretary Humza Yousaf. His argument, and that of his leader, is the “sheer weight” of Omicron cases could overwhelm the NHS and precautions will have to be taken. He is right to be cautious about the risks of the variant. We know that it spreads fast. What we do not yet know is whether its effects are as serious as the Delta variant, or the original Covid strain, but the risk to an over-stretched health service is one that cannot be ignored.
Whether the NHS will be able to fulfil Sturgeon’s promise, without further postponing non-urgent care and elective surgeries is doubtful. Nor do the long queues for boosters and the apparent scarcity of lateral flow devices bode well for the policy on self-isolation and daily tests for close contacts. No doubt such teething troubles will be ironed out. Yet the shortcomings in the service so harshly exposed by the pandemic are likely to endure. Only recently has the scale of the secondary public health crisis arising from the near-exclusive focus by hospitals on Covid over the past two years become clear. The National Audit Office, for example, has identified 740,000 missed cancer cases. Yet as long as frontline staff are redeployed to the booster effort, with routine appointments, surgeries and outpatient clinics cancelled, the pressures will only grow, with the same deleterious toll.
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That is not, of course, an argument against a rapid, well-resourced booster rollout. The emergence of such a highly transmissible strain of the virus demands nothing less. Even so, that non-Covid patients should be put at risk for the sake of measures that may well be too little, too late, is a mark of a health service in disarray. To put normal care on hold indefinitely, as may well be required, is an abdication of the NHS’s most basic responsibility to the public that funds it.
Meanwhile the public, weary both of the virus itself and the constant revision of rules and recommendations, needs to be kept convinced that the government is on the right track. The first minister has mainly kept the nation on board with her cautious approach. But if she is to retain that trust, she needs to explain her policy clearly and bring with it convincing evidence that shows she understands the balance between containing the pandemic and maintaining the stability of the economy.