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.