Jeane Freeman warns Scotland ‘cannot eradicate’ coronavirus just ‘suppress it as much as possible’

Jeane Freeman has warned Scotland “cannot eradicate” coronavirus, just “suppress it as much as possible”.

The Scottish health secretary claimed there was not a prospect of getting rid of the virus for good, but the Scottish Government’s aim was to get rates to a manageable level.

Speaking at the daily briefing on Friday, she dismissed the idea of “living with the virus” if it meant regular hospitalisations or deaths.

Ms Freeman said: “I think the goal of this government hasn't changed – it is to suppress the virus to the lowest possible level.

A pedestrian walks along an empty George Street

“You can't eradicate it and we are one part of an island which has other governments in it who will quite rightly take their own policy positions about how they want to handle a health situation and given that health is devolved.

“So we need to find a way for those four nations of the UK to work together as best as we possibly can.

“But we've not moved away from a position that says our objective collectively with the citizens of Scotland is to surpass the level of this virus as law as we possibly can and then really let Test and Protect come into its own, so that it can quickly identify where positive cases exist, Test and Protect contain them, eliminate them, stop them transmitting.”

Scottish national clinical director Jason Leitch agreed coronavirus was never eliminated from Scotland, but there was a way of managing it to prevent deaths.

He explained: “I think I feel like I'm repeating myself, but we've done it already, we did it in the summer.

“We didn't eliminate Covid, but we maximally suppressed it.

“We had a month with nobody dying of Covid, three months after a lockdown, so you don’t have to do it indefinitely. You do have to do it very carefully and for quite a long period.

“That has other harms, that's about schools and businesses and the economy, but [it’s] the way to get that prevalence down and reopen safely – and crucially, don’t import new variants.”

His comments come after Professor Mark Woolhouse, chair of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said Scotland was not close to eliminating the virus at any point.

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