Chamber and committees

—given my long-standing clinical and epidemiological background. [Laughter.]

Fundamentally, the pandemic has shown us that the healthier you are, the better your chances are of weathering some form of adversity to your health. Some healthy people have been absolutely felled by Covid, but, in general, keeping yourself in a good state of health is an important prerequisite for handling any situation.

There is an opportunity to reinforce messages about our individual responsibility and opportunity to lead as healthy a life as we can. Those messages have been around for a long time, but they need to be reinforced. I know the importance of ensuring that people are physically healthy, eating well and exercising. Routine, several-times-a-day factors can be significant in the amount of weight that we carry, how we feel and how much energy we have.

If I go for a run before I start my working day, I generally have a better day, because I have looked after myself in the morning. All those things count when taken together. I know that such points will resonate with Mr Whittle—us athletes have to stick together. [Laughter.]

Mr Whittle makes a serious point about the opportunities, which links to what Mr Fairlie said about public awareness. The messaging that we provide about our health and wellbeing has to equip people with the ideas and arguments that will enable them to be as physically capable as possible of withstanding some of the issues that Covid can throw at us.

I invite Professor Leitch to add to that.

I would agree, where we can do that, but I would simply say that, to my knowledge, the Government does not run any leisure facilities in the country. We are hugely dependent on local authorities for the running of leisure facilities. I am not trying to split hairs—it is a very practical point. I encourage local authorities, in deciding their priorities, to create the opportunities for exercise events.

I can think of really good examples that I have seen in my constituency, where health professionals have gone along to lunch clubs for senior citizens and persuaded them to get involved in a wee bit of exercise, sitting in their chairs, before they have their soup and sandwiches. When health professionals have gone along to such events in the community and engaged with people in that way, those interventions have helped to strengthen mobility and to push against the frailty of some of our senior citizens.

There are simple things that can be done, and I assure Mr Whittle that the Government will be engaged in messaging about that activity and on the substance of those interventions, where we are able to do so.

I do not think so, and I think that the evidence bears out why that is the case. In my opening remarks, I talked about the fact that we are in a much stronger position in relation to the number of people in hospital with Covid. However, although that figure is falling, it is still double what it was just before Christmas.

Before Christmas, in this committee and externally, I used language that warned about the galloping nature of omicron and what that would do to hospital admissions, and it did, indeed, affect hospital admissions in the way that I said that it would. Hospital admissions reached very significant levels—at its height, the number of people in hospital with Covid came very close to 1,700. Comparatively, that was a very high level, and it got there very quickly, at a time when the rest of the health system was under all the acute pressures that winter brings.

Therefore, I think that the preventative measures that we put in place were necessary to avoid us getting to a position where our health service was overwhelmed. It is clear from looking at the pace of the increase in hospital admissions that took place prior to Christmas that, if we had not acted but just allowed omicron to take its course, the health service would have been overwhelmed. I am pretty certain of that.

I do not know whether Professor Leitch wants to add to that.

We will have to consider that issue. At this stage, however, my answer is a firm no. We have to continue with the daily publication of that information to inform the public about the state of the pandemic. Although the outlook is much better, there are still—on average—more than 6,500 to 7,000 cases daily. In previous periods of the pandemic, those numbers would have absolutely horrified us. Obviously, there is an awful lot more protection within the population through the booster vaccination programme.

We will consider those issues. However, at this stage, it is important that we continue to furnish the debate with that quality of information to ensure that there is transparency around the state of the pandemic and the decisions that Government has to take in the light of that data.

I reassure Mr Rowley that the Government is already investing in excess of £1 billion in the NHS recovery plan to do exactly what he asks of us. It is appropriate and important that we do exactly that.

Secondly, there is limited private sector capacity in Scotland, so the priority for the Government is to ensure that we work with health boards to suppress Covid and maximise the available capacity for non-Covid healthcare, so that we can rebalance the health service and so that we do not have to return to the situation that we have, regrettably, been in for the past two years of having to allocate an increasing proportion of our healthcare resources to dealing with Covid. It is important that we rebalance that to deal with routine treatments.

There is a variety of sources that the Government would go to. There is a lot of expert opinion available. During my time as education secretary, I spent some time in fascinating discussions with Professor Cath Noakes, a renowned expert on ventilation who, if my memory serves me correctly, is a professor at the University of Leeds. She provided substantive advice to me on those questions. There is a lot of good advice available for us on those questions and it is important that we take it from the people with the right discipline of view.

This relates to the answer that I gave to Mr Rowley a second ago, and I will maybe bring in Professor Leitch on this point as well. A substantial amount of data is already published on the number of people who are receiving treatment for particular conditions, the number of people who are waiting for treatment for a range of conditions and the length of time that those individuals are waiting.

A wide cross-section of information is available on that question, which allows the public to judge what progress has been made on addressing the health challenges that we face. Members of the public will be able to look at performance today compared with performance during the pandemic at its height and performance prior to the pandemic to see the comparative situation in which we find ourselves in relation to the disruption that the pandemic has created.

I assure the committee that the Government is taking steps to ensure that as much as possible is done through the health service recovery plans and the capacity that we have and that we are creating to ensure that any backlog of treatment is properly and fully addressed. Those data sets are available for us to judge performance on that question.

Just the two?

Yes.

The JCVI has decided not to recommend further booster vaccinations—which would be a fourth dose—for the over-80s, although it specifically considered that proposition. We await further advice from the JCVI about what might become the more routine approach to vaccination for future programmes. Obviously, that will depend significantly on the course of the pandemic, what we experience between now and then, and whether a new variant emerges.

I return to a point that I have rehearsed with the committee before. In late November, the Cabinet took a view on the Tuesday that the pandemic was quite benign, and, by the Thursday, we had omicron. Things can change very quickly, and we stand ready to deploy whatever is necessary to deliver on the vaccination advice that we receive from the JCVI. What reassures us is our solid experience of delivering a colossal vaccination programme with significant efficiency and effectiveness. That should give us confidence that we can pivot in order to take forward whatever the JCVI proposes.