3. Today’s

Scotsman revealed that, in the midst of the pandemic, one of NHS Scotland’s Covid testing labs closed because it was not being used. That happened while the First Minister was rejecting Scottish Green calls for weekly testing for national health service staff and carers on the front line—a proposal that was backed by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, the Royal College of Nursing and Scottish Care.

Not deploying testing to its fullest to help to control the virus is clearly a policy choice. Although the World Health Organization has been clear from the start that we need to test, test, test, the Scottish Government has chosen not to follow the WHO but to take its own approach. Can the First Minister explain why she does not agree with the WHO and why her Government allowed a testing lab to close down?

Both issues are related, but I will address them in turn. We test in line with clinical advice. We have massively increased the numbers and the groups that we are testing, but we take advice on when it is right and effective to test people and when it is less effective to do so. We will continue to do that when making those decisions.

Of course we have to have the capacity to implement a testing strategy, but the decisions that we make about testing are driven by the clinical efficacy and the advice on that.

The laboratory was activated during the early stages of the pandemic because we did not, at that point, have the NHS capacity. The laboratory was activated while we were building that NHS capacity; it was never designed to be a permanent provision. The daily capacity in NHS Lothian has more than doubled since the lab was activated—that is, since the beginning of April. That means that labs such as that one can return to the important research work that they had been doing and which they want to return to.

We are also developing regional hubs, which will give us longer-term, sustainable, additional NHS capacity, including in Lothian. We are building the NHS capacity so that some of the provision that was used in the early stages can return to its original purposes.

Obviously, it is not either/or. The fact of the matter is that we could have been doing 1,000 more tests a day and the First Minister will be aware that inadequate testing was available for when the schools returned in August, which we now know was avoidable.

The University of Cambridge has offered all undergraduate and postgraduate students living in university accommodation a weekly Covid test, regardless of whether they show symptoms. That is because the university wants to break the chains of infection before symptoms appear. A similar asymptomatic testing service for students and staff is being delivered by the University of Nottingham.

Instead of relying on the failed privatised United Kingdom testing system, those universities have taken things into their own hands to keep their staff and students safe, but that is not happening in Scotland. The Scottish Government continues to follow an old, outdated testing strategy that is based largely on testing only those with symptoms. Can the First Minister explain why her Government has allowed Scottish universities to fall behind when it comes to testing? What will her Government do to establish regular testing for university staff and students?

The First Minister:

The testing strategy that we follow is kept under review all the time and is updated in line with clinical advice when that is appropriate. There are differences of clinical opinion and scientific opinion about the efficacy of asymptomatic testing. In particularly vulnerable settings such as care homes, we now test many more people who are asymptomatic; care home workers are the obvious example of that.

The clinical advice right now is that in universities we should be focusing on testing those with symptoms so that positive cases can be identified and contact tracing can be done to break those chains of transmission. We have established walk-through sites in university settings; in the past week, almost 4,000 tests have been conducted in those walk-through sites alone in order to identify positive cases.

We continue to look at when and how we expand our testing and it is important that, as we make those decisions and as those decisions are rightly and legitimately scrutinised, we do not confuse the capacity and the issue of how we process the tests with the clinical decisions that determine who we test and for what purposes. We will continue to keep that strategy under review and it will be informed by the best possible clinical advice.