Nicola Sturgeon will today tell households to limit mixing and consider the return of social distancing as part of plans to curb the spread of Omicron.
The Times understands that the first minister does not intend to expand vaccine passports to venues beyond nightclubs and large sporting events when she outlines new guidance to slow the coronavirus variant that threatens to upend Christmas.
Her strategy will instead focus on reducing contact between different households and other “preventative measures” as Humza Yousaf, the health secretary, said yesterday some additional restrictions are “inevitable”.
Ministers and senior officials were debating the details of options late into last night before a morning cabinet meeting where any changes will be signed off before being announced to the public this afternoon.
In other developments:
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•Schools are expected to remain open until Christmas after Sturgeon defied demands by unions to close them early.
•Scottish businesses expressed fears that festive trade is going to collapse as consumer confidence drops sharply.
• Boris Johnson, the prime minister, announced the first death in the UK from Omicron. Ten people are in hospital with the variant of whom most have received two vaccines.
• There are now 4,713 confirmed cases of Omicron in the UK but the UK Health Security Agency estimates that 200,000 people were infected by the variant yesterday, suggesting it has already overtaken Delta.
• Most high school children are on the verge of depression after a decline in overall mental health during the pandemic, an official survey found.
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In a BBC interview yesterday Sturgeon admitted that getting booster jabs to all Scots aged 18 and above by the end of this year would be a “monumental challenge”.
She had previously said she would attempt to match the pledge to roll out the doses before Hogmanay after Boris Johnson made the same promise for people south of the border.
Sturgeon wants every adult to get a booster by Hogmanay — she needs to explain herself clearly today
Deliveries of vaccine doses to units will be doubled in England today as centres were told to put up tents and Portakabins to get through as many jabs as possible.
However, despite the mobilisation, NHS leaders fear they are being “set up to fail” by Johnson’s promise of a million jabs a day.
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Yesterday 38,000 boosters were administered, taking the proportion of Scotland’s adult population to be triple dosed to 48 per cent.
With approximately 1.7 million eligible people still to receive their third vaccine, 90,000 doses a day would have to be delivered before Hogmanay to hit the ambitious target.
About 100 servicemen and women from the British Army are assisting with vaccinations in 11 health board areas across Scotland — Ayrshire and Arran, Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, Forth Valley, Grampian, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Highland, Lanarkshire, Lothian and Tayside.
A spokesman said that 70 additional staff would be deployed to the vaccine programme in Scotland in the coming days, once they have received training.
Amid a rapid acceleration of the vaccination rollout, Sturgeon said she did not underestimate the scale of the challenge.
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But as she stressed that vaccination was the “best line of defence” against Omicron, she added: “We’ve got to bust a gut to get this programme done as quickly as possible.”
The first minister said that government officials, working with local health boards, were considering “all of the possible options to build capacity in a system that is already operating at a very fast pace”.
This will be achieved by a combination of bringing in additional staff to administer the jabs, increasing the number of appointments at vaccine centres and potentially opening up new hubs, she said.
“We also know from some of the early evidence in terms of being infected with Omicron one or two doses is not sufficient . . . so it’s really, really important we get booster jabs into people’s arms as quickly as possible,” Sturgeon added.
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, urged the Scottish government to “pull out all the stops” and speed up the vaccine booster rollout with new mass vaccination centres and drop-in clinics.
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He said these large-scale hubs should be opened in town halls across Scotland if clinics on the scale of the Hydro or P&J Live event complexes are not possible. A Scottish government official previously played down the prospect of relaunching the centres.
“Mass vaccination centres were game-changing in delivering the first round of Covid jabs,” Ross said. “The number of jabs getting into people’s arms went through the roof once those venues were opened. The rapid rollout of mass vaccine centres and more drop-in clinics is now a necessity.”
Meanwhile, most high school children are on the verge of depression after months of school closures and anxiety associated with the pandemic, an official survey found.
More than 1,300 pupils from 50 high schools across Scotland were asked to give a mark out of five on 14 questions linked to mental health, such as how often they felt lonely or optimistic.
Pupils who scored all 1s were given a score of 14, indicating severe depression, while all 5s scored 70, indicating there was no cause for concern.
A score between 41 and 45 is “indicative of possible mild depression” while anything less than 41 indicates “probable clinical depression”.
The average score in Scotland was 44.9 in the survey, which was conducted by Ipsos MORI for the Scottish government throughout February and March this year.
This is down from 48.4 in 2015 and 46.9 in 2018, indicating child mental illness was already on the rise before the pandemic.
The latest Scottish government report on pupils’ mental well being states: “When compared with mean scores from previous surveys, pupils appeared to report poorer mental well being in early 2021 than before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Pupils were most likely to report ‘sometimes’ feeling lonely (42 per cent) . . . over half, 55 per cent, of the pupils felt optimistic.”
Mental well being declines as pupils progress through high school, with S1 pupils reporting an average score of 46.9 and S5 pupils reporting a score of 42.3.
The report states: “Older pupils’ mean scores were within a suggested range that indicates possible depression.
“A similar pattern of results was reported in the Lockdown Lowdown survey, which found that older respondents were less likely to report feeling good about their mental well being than younger respondents. Before the pandemic, older pupils also appeared to have lower scores than younger pupils.”
Girls had poorer mental well being than boys as they were more likely to feel lonely and less likely to feel optimistic.
The report states: “For female pupils, their mean score is within a suggested range that indicates possible depression.”
About 13 per cent of pupils showed signs of “problematic social media use”.