Nicola Sturgeon: Scotland’s “Test and Protect” strategy to be launched on Thursday

Scotland will launch its national test and trace strategy in the next phase of the battle against Coronavirus this week as the country emerges from lockdown, Nicola Sturgeon has announced.

Nicola Sturgeon has unveiled Scotland's new national testing regime

The “Test and Protect” system mean that Scots who develop symptoms will be asked to report their symptoms to the health authorities and provide details of all other people they've been in close contact with.

This will include members of their households, people who've they been in face to face contact with and others they've been within two meters distance of for more than 15 minutes. The system will be launched on Thursday.

A public awareness campaign will also be launched this week driving home the message for symptomatic Scots now to come forward.

The First Minister warned Scots that they may be contacted by an army of 2,000 tracers and instructed to "self-isolate" for two weeks if they are identified by an infected person as a contact.

"This is a big thing, it really matters," Ms Sturgeon said during her daily Coronavirus briefing today.

"This is a system that will operate on a scale not seen before in Scotland.

"We have, of course, had testing and contact tracing before but we are substantially increasing the scale."

The launch of the strategy will co-incide with Scotland entering phase one of its lockdown exit on Thursday.

As the country gradually gets back more everyday activity, the focus on suppressing the virus will shift from the "stay at home" approach to quickly identifying future cases and "isolating" the chain of people linked to them, so choking off the spread.

There is now capacity for 15,000 tests a day to be undertaken in Scotland as part of the new system, Ms Sturgeon said today.

New software will also be operational in health boards across the country by Thursday, after being piloted in Fife.

The Scottish Government had pledged to have 2,000 contact tracers in place by the end of the month. The First Minister said today that the Government was on course to have a pool "around 2000" to call on by the end of May, although the figure stands at 1615 at the moment. About 700 are expected to be required in the early stages.

Ms Sturgeon added: “For the the first couple of weeks it will need to bed down. We're introducing it at the same time as we take the first very cautious steps out of lockdown which gives us the opportunity to address any operational issues ahead of a potentially more substantial easing of restrictions at the next review date in three weeks."

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