Nicola Sturgeon says coronavirus is in 'retreat' but lockdown stays in place

Nicola Sturgeon has announced that coronavirus is “in retreat” in Scotland as she said it was vital to continue the stringent lockdown and denied the four-nation approach to tackling Covid-19 was crumbling in the face of differing messages from the Scottish and UK governments.

Nicola Sturgeon has said coronavirus is in retreat in Scotland.

In an televised address to Scotland, the First Minister acknowledged for the first time that Scotland may be past the peak of the virus, but said she would not “risk unnecessary deaths by acting rashly or prematurely”.

She said while seven weeks of restrictions had saved lives and the numbers of coronavirus deaths and Covid-19 patients in intensive care were falling, the progress was “too fragile” to jeopardise.

Ms Sturgeon took to the airwaves to underline the Scottish Government’s continued “stay home, stay safe” message as confusion reigned after Boris Johnson’s Sunday statement announcing some lockdown measures were being lifted. The Prime Minister came in for criticism for not specifying the changes applied to England, while the governments of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, were still in full lockdown as the rate of transmission was believed to be higher.

In her broadcast she said: “Seven weeks ago the virus was spreading out of control. Today, it is in retreat.

“Those who work in our NHS have been under immense pressure – and they have responded magnificently – but the health service has not been overwhelmed in the way we feared it would be.

“In the last four weeks, the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care has fallen by almost two thirds. And last week, we saw the most welcome sign of all. For the first time since the epidemic started, the number of deaths registered in a single week fell.

“So the progress is real and it is down to you. But our progress is still fragile. If we ease up too soon, the virus could run out of control again. That would mean more people dying and all of us staying in lockdown much longer.

“There will of course be risks whenever we start to ease the lockdown. But my judgement right now is that the risk is still too great.”

She added that she understood people’s frustrations, that she missed seeing her own family, but “we are asking you to stick with lockdown for a bit longer - so that we can consolidate our progress, not jeopardise it.”

Earlier, at the daily briefing from St Andrew’s House, the messaging on the Scottish Government plinths had changed from displaying the NHS coronavirus website details to a slogan plainly stating “Stay At Home”, in direct contrast to the UK government ditching the latter message for “Stay Alert”.

However Ms Sturgeon refuted suggestions that a joint four-nation approach to suppressing the virus was “breaking down”.

She said while there was an “understandable tendency” to see “division” as the governments were taking “slightly different approaches, on different timelines in different parts of the UK”, there was no “breaking down of the four-nations approach”.

She added: “I would ask people not to see it as that. I am still very keen to co-operate and collaborate as much as possible and I still think as much alignment as possible is really important, if not on the fine detail and timing if the evidence says otherwise, then in the overall approach we’re taking.

“I’m looking to align our positions as much as possible but of course the decisions about when and what has to be guided by the scientific evidence here in Scotland.”

Asked if she considered Mr Johnson’s lifting of restrictions to be premature, she said: “It’s not for me to judge if the actions are premature for England, but they are premature for Scotland.

“Within a four-nations approach, which is still there, we can either have a pragmatic acceptance that the evidence puts us all on to slightly different timelines, which is what we’ve got now, or you can decide to go at the pace of the slowest. Where we’ve got to now is we might move at different speeds depending on the evidence.

“I can’t judge the right speed for England but it’s my responsibility to judge the right speed for Scotland and I believe it’s premature for Scotland. My judgement on some of them might be different next week, and in two weeks different still.”

According to Ms Sturgeon the differences between governments were in “degrees not in the fundamentals of approach” and she hoped to start making changes to the lockdown in Scotland in the next week or two.

She said: “Let’s keep going for just a bit longer to solidify that progress and then allow us to ease these restrictions with sufficient headroom that we’re not immediately going to see everything going backwards.

“I know I’m asking for a lot, but just a bit more patience and a bit more sacrifice from all of us will put us into a much stronger position to then start to ease these restrictions in a way that if orderly and allows us to keep going in that direction, rather than in a way that perhaps risks everything we have just achieved.

“I make no apology for being a bit cautious in all of this. I don’t like standing up here, each and every day, announcing figures of people who have died. I really don’t and I know it’s really horrible for people listening to it, and it’s particularly horrible for those who have lost loved ones.

“I don’t want to play Russian roulette with any of this. I want to get us to a position where we fell confident about starting to ease this.”

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