Nicola Sturgeon was more cautious on Covid lockdowns ‘just to be different’ to England
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Nicola Sturgeon’s government pursued a more cautious pandemic strategy as it was important to them to be different to England, a top scientist has told the Covid inquiry.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scottish Government Covid-19 Advisory Group, said the SNP administration provided no evidence that lifting restrictions later than England would benefit the public.
The professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh also launched a scathing attack on the former first minister’s Covid elimination strategy which he said was based on “empty rhetoric” and was misleading.
Giving evidence on Wednesday, Prof Woolhouse told the inquiry that following the first lockdown in March 2020, Ms Sturgeon took a more cautious approach to lifting restrictions than the UK Government.
Responding to questions from Jamie Dawson KC, counsel to the inquiry, he said it was important to the SNP government to act differently from England.
“So I have to say, I didn’t understand the Scottish Government’s strategy over the summer of 2020,” he said. “The emphasis was on a very, very cautious relaxation from the lockdown.
“And it seemed to be important to the politicians that it was more cautious than the one in England, so they were emphasising that they didn’t articulate in any way that I understood, what they thought the public health benefit of this caution actually would be given what we said about a second wave.
“And then this segued into this idea that actually, the falling cases in Scotland would somehow continue, we could end up in zero Covid.”
No Covid death was ‘acceptable’
He added: “This was not consistent with the evidence that had been available since February 2020.”
Over the summer of 2020, the Scottish Government lifted many restrictions later than in England, such as waiting two weeks longer to re-open pubs and doing the same for non-essential shops.
Prof Woolhouse was asked about the Covid elimination approach pursued by the Scottish Government which in policy documents said that no Covid death was “acceptable”.
During the pandemic, Ms Sturgeon repeatedly claimed she was committed to achieving virus “elimination” during the first year, driving case numbers as close to zero as possible.
As late as March 2021, a year after the first Covid lockdown, the former first minister claimed elimination was the “only sensible strategy”.
However, Prof Woolhouse said this approach was unrealistic and pointed out that hundreds of people would still die of Covid this year.
“It’s empty rhetoric, it misleads everybody, it misleads the public. It gives an entirely false impression of what the future holds, how this pandemic is going to look.
“The idea implies no Covid death is acceptable in a world where no one died of Covid.”
He added that zero Covid policies eventually failed and would have required “indefinite lockdown” or a “miracle cure” to be successful in achieving the aim of making no death acceptable.
He added that the focus on eliminating Covid meant more people died from other causes and the policy “devalues non-Covid deaths”.
“That isn’t just a sort of philosophical complaint,” he said. “The intense, very strong advice in Scotland to spare the NHS during, particularly during the first wave, and not bother the NHS.”
He said A&E attendance “fell off a cliff” and hospitals in Scotland had “their quietest time in living memory during the first wave” as thousands died across the UK at home.
“They died because the focus of the government was preparing the NHS Scotland for Covid, and concentrating on that, because no Covid death is acceptable, other kinds of deaths apparently are, and they rose.”
Prof Woolhouse also attacked elements of lockdown saying that bans on outdoor activities were “utterly absurd” and that schools had remained shut longer than necessary.
“I really feel very strongly, what we did to the children. It would be bad enough if if there was a detectable and measurable public health benefit, but there wasn’t, it wasn’t necessary, and we did it anyway.
“I don’t understand how we went from a position of being quite evidence-based about school closures to suddenly forgetting all that in the early part of 2021. That baffles me.”
‘What a mess’
Prof Woolhouse was asked about his written statement where he said that the stay-at-home order should have been released earlier.
“I would take that further. The stay-at-home order was never necessary,” he said.
“The job was already done by the measures. There’s actually evidence in the Scottish government’s own report that was the case.”
In other evidence submitted to the inquiry, messages reveal that Nicola Sturgeon was furious at public health officials for advising Scots to cancel work Christmas parties when the Omicron variant struck.
WhatsApp messages between Prof Leitch and Kate Forbes, then SNP finance minister, show Ms Sturgeon was enraged by officials at the supposedly independent agency issuing its own advice.
“What a mess,” Prof Leitch wrote to Ms Forbes on the morning of Dec 10 2021. “Honestly!!! No one knew PHS were going to say this. FM and I spoke at 11 [the previous night]. There was swearing. From both of us.”
The inquiry continues on Thursday when it will hear from Humza Yousaf, the First Minister and Liz Lloyd, Nicola Sturgeon’s former chief of staff.
