Don’t let Nicola Sturgeon’s attack on BBC’s Sarah Smith deflect from real Covid issues – Brian Wilson

When it comes to errors of judgement in the coronavirus crisis, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has bigger questions to answer than journalist Sarah Smith, writes Brian Wilson.

A fine old metaphor about “more front than a Glasgow tenement” increasingly applies to Scotland’s relationship with the pandemic.

The façade is confident and largely unscathed while what lies behind is grim. More than 3,500 lives have been lost, half of them in the appalling cull through care homes.

Recrimination is pointless unless it serves the immediate purpose of teaching lessons which can be applied with urgency, competence and humility. That is where we seem to fall down lamentably.

The folly of discharging elderly patients from hospitals into care homes was apparent months ago. This was pointed out from all sorts of sources – including this one - but the practice continued.

We now know figures provided to MSPs were grossly understated and the Health Secretary, Jeane Freeman, has apologised. I suppose that is progress of a sort but what price was paid over the lost weeks when the issue was in such obvious need of addressing?

The Nike outbreak in Edinburgh remains fundamental to any analysis of how the Scottish Government has handled this crisis. And let me digress for a moment to answer the demand: “Why not criticise the UK Government instead?”

This is not a competition. The UK Government has no shortage of questions to answer but the NHS and social care are devolved. Decisions taken in Scotland determine Scottish outcomes and the decision not to reveal the Nike outbreak was the Scottish Government’s alone.

“Cover-up” is headline shorthand. My preferred phrase is “monumental error of judgement which had far-reaching implications”. If that had been acknowledged early, even internally, lessons might have been applied.

The defence of patient confidentiality has collapsed. Scottish legislation recognises that public interest prevails in such circumstances. EU data protection law is even more specific where “the control and monitoring of epidemics” is at stake.

Beyond that, we now know that unannounced attempts at contact tracing were a fiasco with some of the most obvious candidates left unaware. As admitted by Ms Freeman, such tracing as did take place relied on information provided by visiting delegates.

If the outbreak had been revealed, public perceptions of the threat would have been transformed and a far wider range of contacts identified. It is absurd to pretend, as Ms Sturgeon continues to do, that “all appropriate steps were taken to trace contacts”.

That is in the past but, again, what lessons were learned? Ten weeks later, not a single contract tracer had been recruited so that “test, track and trace” which is finally supposed to resume on 1 June is riddled with uncertainties. Why was this not advanced long before now at local levels?

On 3 April, the First Minister set a target of 10,000 daily tests by the end of that month and proclaimed: “Proportionately, our target is a bit more ambitious than the UK as a whole.” Was that important compared to the fact that the target is still nowhere near being met?

Every health jurisdiction in the world which has successfully addressed the pandemic acted early on principles of test, track and trace. Three months in, it is not “insulting” to anyone’s “integrity” – Ms Sturgeon’s favoured deflection for this week – to ask whether any of these building blocks are even now secured in Scotland?

The First Minister has a tough job and her sensitivities deserve respect but the milk of human kindness should flow in both directions. She might have considered that sentiment before turning her fire on Sarah Smith of the BBC.

No reasonable person believes Ms Smith accused her of “enjoying” the pandemic or its awful consequences. However, the SNP’s media supremo, one Erik Geddes, tweeted “shameful”, allowing Scotland’s First Minister to retweet and add her denial of an allegation that had not been made, thereby unleashing the cyberspace-stormtroopers against Ms Smith.

It was a ruthless operation in a time of pandemic. If Ms Smith made an error of judgement it was a minor one which certainly did not cost a single human life. There are plenty more important matters to dub “shameful” in this sorry saga.

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