3. I welcome the fact that the Scottish Tories and Labour have joined me in calling for regular testing in hospitals. More importantly, workers on the front line have long been asking for that to happen. There are front-page reports today that nurses are angry and demoralised about the spread of the virus on their wards. This week, yet another senior physician in a Scottish hospital has contacted me, expressing dismay that people are being allowed to walk around hospitals, spreading the virus without knowing it.

We now know that patients and staff have been infected with Covid in hospitals. Many of them have even lost their lives as a result. In April, experts told us that regular testing could reduce transmission in hospitals by up to a third. Does the First Minister know how many lives could be saved if we followed that advice? Will she tell us when her Government will introduce regular testing in hospitals?

As I have just said to Richard Leonard, the expert-driven nosocomial review group is examining that issue, and I hope that it will give us recommendations on it quickly. When it does, we will implement those recommendations.

It is right and proper, in my view, that we continue to take clinical advice about testing, for two reasons. First, as any clinician will tell you, there has to be a purpose to the tests that are carried out on people from an ethical point of view. Secondly—I have made this point repeatedly—while we still have concerns about what I stress is the relative reliability of the test for asymptomatic people, we do not want inadvertently to suggest that testing is the only thing that needs to be done to reduce the risk of transmission of the virus. That is particularly true in hospitals. With all infections, not just Covid-19, infection prevention and control measures are most important. They are taken extremely seriously by all health boards and in all hospitals.

The last point that I make to Alison Johnstone is the same, I think, as the last point that I made to Richard Leonard regarding the unvalidated statistics that have been reported about the possibility of hospital-acquired infection. We do not yet know whether those infections were acquired in hospitals—although I expect that there will be hospital-acquired infection—but it is really important that we recognise that that information has not been validated. Because of the incubation periods associated with the virus, some of the infections could have been acquired in the community. Let us be very careful when we are talking about these things so that we are dealing in facts, not in supposition. That is particularly important given the severity of the topic.

The First Minister referred to infection prevention and control methods, one of which is routinely screening health professionals working in hospitals for other diseases. There seems to be a worrying lack of urgency, however, in testing for this potentially life-threatening disease.

For some time, the Scottish Government has resisted the principle of testing individuals without symptoms, arguing that the test itself only works in a window of symptomatic people. During the past month, however, testing has been expanded, which I warmly welcome. Most critically, regular testing of care workers has begun—in theory, at least.

It emerged this morning that the only reason regular testing was introduced was that the United Kingdom Government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies—SAGE—recommended it.

Although it began discussing the issue in early May, the Scottish Government’s scientific advisory group has not yet delivered advice and we are told that the advice is still weeks away. Does the First Minister have advice that the science, which supports regular testing in care homes, is not relevant to our hospitals? The testing capacity is already in place to do it. Is the First Minister waiting until the UK Government advises her to do it?

The First Minister:

I am not sure whether I followed the thread of that question; I was not sure whether Alison Johnstone was criticising us for following advice that comes from SAGE. We take advice from SAGE, and our advisory group feeds into SAGE and gives us advice. As I have said on several occasions today, the nosocomial review group is looking at the issues that are associated with hospital-acquired infection. We follow all that clinical advice.

Alison Johnstone said that we have resisted the principle of testing asymptomatic people. It is not about a principle; it is about practical efficacy and effectiveness. Even today, experts continue to say that the test is less reliable in people who do not have symptoms. Therefore, all along, my concern has been that, if we focus all our efforts on testing—even though, in some cases, it gives false reassurance—then we take our eye off the ball of the other, more important things that need to be done to minimise the risk of transmission, particularly in institutional settings such as hospitals and care homes.

We take a range of scientific and expert advice; I am not sure that anybody should criticise us for doing that. At times, waiting for that advice means that we do not rush to make announcements that prove not to have been the right announcements. We take time to make sure that the work is done properly, because it needs to be done for the right reasons and on a sustainable basis. The Scottish Government will continue to take that careful approach to all aspects of handling the virus.