Question reference: S6W-00305
- Asked by: Alexander Burnett, MSP for Aberdeenshire West, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 1 June 2021
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Current status: Answered by John Swinney on 10 June 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government for what reason the number of cases of infection is being used as a criterion to assess the threat of COVID-19, when it is disassociated from the number of hospital admittances and the number of deaths caused by COVID-19.
Answer
The coronavirus outbreak remains a real and sustained threat to human life in Scotland as well as to social and economic well-being. The Scottish Government has always relied on a range of indicators and criteria, combined with clinical advice and local intelligence about the state of epidemic, to construct a full, reliable, and robust picture of the threat posed by COVID-19 across the four harms.
On 14 May, we published Coronavirus (COVID-19) protective measures: indicators and data which sets out the indicators to assess the threat of Covid-19, and inform when and how we introduce, adapt, or ease protective measures. This includes core indicators, measuring both community transmission and healthcare capacity at a local level, and secondary indicators which provide critical information on viral concentration, prevalence and incidence of COVID-19 cases, testing (including access), vaccination, mortality, and hospitalisations at any given local level.
The scale and extent of our successful vaccination programme is enabling us to consider how we can respond to the virus moving forward. We are growing increasingly confident that vaccination is helping break the link between case numbers and hospitalisation and death. However, currently the evidence base remains insufficient, especially in light of the Delta variant, which we are currently attempting to better understand. That is why it is still important to keep cases as low as possible, to reduce the chances of transmission and new variants developing.