5. To ask the First Minister whether the Scottish Government will provide a weekly breakdown by local authority of the R number for Covid-19. (S5F-04198)

The R number is calculated for Scotland as well as for the other three countries of the United Kingdom, and we publish it on a weekly basis. The R number is not calculated for Scottish local authorities, because the ranges around the estimates would be very large and that would not help us to understand the differences between different areas of Scotland. Instead of doing that, we are looking at other ways of monitoring and forecasting the level of Covid-19 in local authority areas. We use data such as the number of cases and hospitalisations, and we will use the information that starts to come through the test and protect programme.

Along with the Deputy First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, I took part in a lengthy session yesterday about the surveillance systems that we are building to ensure that, not only at a national level but at a local level, we can monitor and, where possible, predict what happens with the virus in the weeks and months to come.

I hear what the First Minister says, but it is important that we look at local figures for the R number, because, in that way, we might be able to allow businesses, particularly those in the hard-pressed leisure and tourism sectors, to reopen in certain areas, and we might be able to monitor any change in the R number as a consequence of reopening, if that can take place. In my constituency and elsewhere, hotels and businesses that provide leisure activities will collapse into liquidation if something does not happen soon.

The First Minister:

I agree with Christine Grahame on the objective that she is encouraging. The issue is simply about how we do that. Even when we publish the R number for Scotland, there is a range, as everybody now knows. The current range is 0.7 to 0.9—the up-to-date estimate will be published tomorrow—so there is already a degree of uncertainty. The smaller the area for which we try to calculate an R number, the greater the range of uncertainty is. It is thought that an R number at local authority level would not tell us very much, in a meaningful way, about the differences between areas.

That does not mean that we do not want to monitor the spread or behaviour of the virus in different areas—we do. The question is about how we do that. We are looking at other data sources that will give us that information at regional and local authority levels on an on-going basis. Christine Grahame is right that we need to understand what is happening on that basis, but I am trying to explain that we need to do that in different ways from simply publishing regional R numbers.