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.