Nicola Sturgeon Omicron Briefing: RECAP as First Minister says she can’t rule out further restrictions in Scotland ahead of Christmas
The briefing comes after guidance was issued last night from Public Health Scotland urging Scots to cancel their Christmas parties over Omicron fears.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland on Friday morning, Prof Leitch said that Scots should be able to judge themselves what is and isn’t a party following an announcement from Public Health Scotland (PHS) advising people to cancel their Christmas nights out due to the increasing number of cases of the new Omicron variant.
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will hold a briefing on the Omicron variant of Covid-19 alongside Scotland’s chief medical officer Gregor Smith and national clinical director Jason Leitch.
Nicola Sturgeon Omicron Briefing: Live updates amid rising variant cases
Nicola Sturgeon starts the briefing issuing a warning that Scotland may be set to face a ‘tsunami of infections’ and that a new wave maybe starting.
She says “To be blunt, because of the much greater and faster transmissability of this new variant, we may be facing - indeed we may be starting to experience - a potential tsunami of infections.”
“We’re not alone in that - everything I am about to share with you about the situation in Scotland is, I believe, broadly reflected in the data for the rest to the UK too. But, we have just published an evidence paper which provides more detail about Omicron in Scotland.”
As of yesterday there were 110 confirmed Omicron cases in Scotland, but Nicola Sturgeon says confirmed cases are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
The latest stats
9 deaths have been reported in the past 24 hours, which takes the total number of deaths registered under the daily definition to 9,707.
The First Minister says that Scotland is facing a third wave of infections.
She says: “Our estimate at this stage is that the doubling time for Omicron cases may be between 2 and 3 days.”
Nicola Sturgeon says the rise in Omicron cases is potentially “the fastest exponential growth we’ve seen in the pandemic so far” and that she “expects it to take over Delta within days not weeks”
“In the final week of November, if we look at all of the Covid cases recorded in Scotland, there were no days when the proportion of cases with S Gene drop out was higher than 1%. However, by last Sunday, 5th December, the proportion had risen to 2%.”
The First Minister stresses that it is important to stop the spread of Covid and the new variant.
“Because Omicron has a much higher R number - a higher transmissibility - than the Delta variant, which for some time now has been the dominant variant in Scotland and much of the world.”
Sturgeon adds a “massive” number of people are likely to need hospital care if surge in cases takes place.
BREAKING
Nicola Sturgeon: “it isn’t any longer a question of IF we are facing a surge in cases”, says it is “a matter of basic and quite brutal arithmetic”
From tomorrow, all household contacts of any Covid cases should isolate for 10 days. Non household contacts can leave isolation with a negative test and double jabbed status.