I absolutely agree with Richard Leonard’s first comment: we should never forget the human lives lost behind the statistics that we report on every day. Speaking personally, I never, ever will forget—every one of the numbers that I have had to read out daily will be engraved on my heart forever, and I think that that will be true for all of us.

Our NHS is not “stuck”, to use Richard Leonard’s word. It is currently preparing remobilisation plans so that it can safely, but as quickly as possible, resume services that had to be postponed—for reasons that I think that everybody understands—during the Covid crisis.

I turn to the issue of nosocomial infection, which is infection that may be acquired in hospitals. Let me be very clear about this, just as the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport has been very clear about it. We have published unvalidated data, and we did so in an attempt to be open and transparent about the data. As an aside, I note that no equivalent data has yet been published for any of the other United Kingdom nations.

However, it is very important that we understand the limitations of that data before it is validated. I welcome the fact that Richard Leonard used the word “suspected”, because it would be wrong to say that we know that all those infections were acquired in hospital. Many of them may well have been acquired in hospital, but it is also possible, given the incubation period for the virus, that some were acquired in the community but were diagnosed only when a patient or member of staff was in hospital. It is very important to understand that.

There is now a process under way to validate that information. NHS Scotland is working to apply the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control international case definitions for hospital-associated Covid-19. When that work is complete and the information is validated, it will be published in a validated form. As the health secretary has said, we hope that the work will be completed by the end of this month, and the data will be published.

The nosocomial review group was established in early May. It is an expert group that is currently chaired by Professor Jacqui Riley, who is nurse director and healthcare-associated infection executive leader with NHS National Services Scotland; I think that she is an appropriate chair for that work.

The group is looking at a range of things just now, including the extension of routine testing of care home staff—as we have just been talking about—to front-line NHS staff. It will also develop further proposals and recommendations to ensure that everything possible that can be done in hospitals is being done to reduce the possibility of hospital-acquired Covid-19. We will look at what we can publish from that work and make sure that the group’s recommendations are publicly known so that we can be very clear about how they are being taken forward.