Good morning. I think that two factors are at play when we choose what to suggest should open in our advice. One is volume, and the other is how much harm there is to a group by not being open. That applies whether it is the hospitality industry, the oil and gas sector or schools.
On this occasion, it is pretty obvious that we are not worried about two-year-olds transmitting the virus, but we are worried about the adults who are around the two-year-olds and the seven-year-olds and everything that that causes. It is partly about the people at the gates of nursery or school and partly about the staff in those institutions. We are much more worried about the virus among the parents and the carers who are attached to those groups of kids than we are about the kids themselves, because even the new variant does not transmit well between children, and children do not, in the main, get serious illness from the virus.
Therefore, the factors are how many and what the locations are. In the primary schools, is it possible to have the adults more distant, because not so many are turning up? It is not an exact science, but the public health advice now, after we have learned what we have from around the world and from Scotland, is not to do it all at once.
The second question is how much harm there is. All the education recovery group educationists—not the public health advisers—say that the greatest harm is to the youngest children, and so the wellbeing of that group is the first that we should fix if we possibly can. That is why the educational recovery group, in the round—with the public health advice on volume and the educationist advice on harm to the group—says that we should try to bring back those children.
On the convener’s second point, Mr Russell will want to say something about timing, but I can tell you that the public health advice is that we will not know what we have done for three weeks. Because of the incubation period and the nature of the virus, it takes about three weeks for us to know that, if we do X, then Y will happen.