1. I thank the First Minister for advance notice of her statement.

The sobering news in Scotland and across the rest of the UK over the past few days has been a reality check for anyone who thought that the pandemic was on its way out. It is clear that, although we can still hope for further progress to be made over the rest of this year, there will be no swift return to normality.

We all recognise the importance of sticking to the rules—washing our hands, socially distancing and doing our bit. That is down to each and every one of us, and each and every one of us will benefit if we do that.

Last night, the new Scottish contact tracing app was launched. Experts at University College London have said that the uptake of such an app would need to be between 56 and 95 per cent for it to be successful. Reaching those numbers will take a momentous effort.

This morning, I along with thousands of Scots did my bit and downloaded it to my phone and I have no doubt that the First Minister did so, too. However, many people across Scotland do not regularly use apps and are perhaps not as addicted to our phones as the first Minister and I. What is being done to ensure that everybody, including those who are hardest to reach, is being helped to adopt this new technology?

I thank Ruth Davidson for her question, for downloading the app and for taking the opportunity to encourage other people to do so. I appeal to members across the chamber to follow that example. This is not political in any way. All of us have a duty to ask our fellow citizens to do the right thing.

Uptake is important, of course, which is why it is so vital that we encourage people to download the app. There are other views about whether it needs to reach a specific percentage. I take the view that the higher it is, the better—the more people who sign up the better. Everybody who signs up is making a contribution. When I left my office to come to the chamber the download number had just passed 150,000, which is really good progress after a few hours. I hope to see it rise further over the next few days. From tomorrow, there will be a major advertising campaign to back it.

The point about people who do not routinely use smartphones is important. It is for that reason, among others, that we decided not to base our entire test and protect system on a proximity tracing app. We built it from the bottom up, using tried and tested approaches in our public health teams and the app is an enhancement of that.

If you do not have a phone or use the app, you will not be missed from our test and protect system. Everybody who tests positive, notwithstanding the app, will still be contacted by a contact tracer and details of those with whom they have been in contact will be taken. The app adds to that system and it is important to recognise that.

The real value of the app is that it will help us to notify close contacts of positive cases who are not known to the person who has tested positive—somebody they have sat close to in a bus or a train, a pub or a restaurant. That is the importance of the enhancement.

Test and protect is working well—I say that with not a shred of complacency. The most up-to-date figures on its performance were published by Public Health Scotland yesterday. At this stage, well over 90 per cent of index cases and more than 90 per cent of close contacts are being contacted. It is working well, the app is an important enhancement and I hope that we will all get fully behind it.

We all hope that the app works successfully.

We are learning, as we go through the pandemic, that to get ahead of the virus we must fight it across all fronts and testing is at the heart of that. At present, even with the increase in testing that the First Minister has outlined, her strategy focuses on symptomatic cases, on surveillance and on the sick and people at high risk. She made no mention in her statement on wider community testing. Will the current position be the long-term one for the country or is it a staging post towards mass community testing?

The First Minister:

We are working with the United Kingdom Government to try to advance mass community testing. The Prime Minister spoke yesterday about the work that the UK Government is doing and we are engaging with it on that. The UK Government is being frank that not all the technology exists in a developed-enough form. There is a lot of work to do to make testing available on a mass scale in a way that is rapid and easily accessible.

We continue to build the capacity of our current testing system, again in partnership with the UK. Our approach to testing is set out in our current testing strategy, which we keep under constant review. There are some categories of people whom we test regardless of symptoms: care home workers are tested every week, whether or not they have symptoms; some categories of patients who are admitted to hospital and staff who work in our hospitals are also tested routinely; and people working in our education system can access testing if they believe that they may have been exposed to the virus.

Other than that, our advice to people, which is really important, is that they should access testing if they have one of the symptoms of Covid that we regularly remind people of.

We have seen, over recent weeks, that testing in Scotland has increased rapidly and substantially. The most recent figures that can be accessed comparing countries across the UK show that we are testing proportionately more people per head of population.

We work with the UK Government on this, and we will continue to do so as we develop capacity and develop the approaches that we take to testing, in line with our learning about the virus.

I accept that the community testing technology is complex and may not quite be there yet, but we have seen experts such as Professor Jose Vazquez-Boland, chair of infectious diseases at Edinburgh university, and Professor Hugh Pennington explain that we need more than the current measures if we are going to eradicate Covid-19, and identifying those who are asymptomatic, through mass testing, is a really important tool.

The First Minister says that she is working with the UK Government towards mass testing. That is really positive. Is she able to give a bit more information on how she hopes that that will be achieved, and does she have any timescales for informing the public about it?

The First Minister:

We will keep the public informed on an on-going basis. We have published, in recent weeks, our testing strategy, which is available on the Scottish Government website and is kept under review.

I am a firm believer in, if you like, a twin-track approach. We have to focus on the future and we have to commit to trying to develop approaches, even if they are not yet fully enough developed to be implemented now. That is the right approach to developing not just mass testing, but mass rapid testing.

We also have to focus, right now, on the fundamentals of making sure that our current approach to testing can be properly implemented. That is why the development and launch today of Protect Scotland is so important. Having initially decided not to have a Scotland-specific app, we decided to have one when we saw the success of the app on which ours is based in the Republic of Ireland and, more recently, Northern Ireland.

We will focus on the here and now: making sure that people who need testing get access to it quickly. The testing system is largely within a UK-wide network, so we require to work with the UK Government to make sure that we can access that appropriately for Scotland, and we are doing that. We will also look to develop new approaches in the future, as soon as the technology and our ability to implement that is where we need it to be.

Everyone is in agreement on the importance of testing within the suite of tools that are at our disposal, so I will ask the First Minister about a very specific aspect of the testing regime.

We found out yesterday that only 5 per cent of people who are coming into our airports have been contacted by the national contact tracing centre. The most recent Public Health Scotland statistical report said that 631 people were contacted out of the 13,607 who were required to quarantine.

We know that the transport secretary and airport chiefs met earlier this week to discuss that. Will the First Minister commit to introducing a package of support for airport testing, as aviation chiefs have asked?

The First Minister:

There are two issues wrapped up in that question, which I will take separately.

The current approach from Public Health Scotland is to contact a sample of those coming into the country every week who are required to quarantine. We set a target of 20 per cent, or 450 people—whichever was the greatest. Last week, we reached 631 people. The health secretary recently announced additional funding for new contact tracers, with the aim of contacting up to 2,000 passengers a week, from October. That is under the current system.

The second part of the question was whether there is an alternative to quarantine, in whole or in part, through testing of people coming into the country. We have been discussing that with airports, just as the UK Government has, and we are considering that.

To put it bluntly, this is a calculation of the risk of different approaches and the risk that we think it is appropriate to take. We know that the incubation period for the virus is 14 days, so if we test somebody coming into the country on day 1 and they test negative, that does not mean that they will not test positive a day, four days or 14 days later. We would have to be testing at different points, and not everybody would be captured. That said, to be frank, not everybody is captured by quarantine, either.

This is a balance of risk, and those discussions are on-going. I would hope that, in not too much time, we will have alternatives to quarantine that allow us to make more use of testing. However, we have to be sure that the arrangements that we have in place, whatever they are, are providing the maximum protection against the importation of the virus, which remains one of the significant risks that we face.