Nicola Sturgeon faces fury as Scottish vaccine rollout slumps to its LOWEST number of daily jabs – as First Minister prepares tries to trump Boris Johnson’s hotel quarantine plan by unveiling tougher rules for self-isolation
- Nicola Sturgeon will tomorrow announce updated coronavirus rules for Scotland
- First Minister will set out hotel quarantine plans which will be tougher than PM’s
- Ms Sturgeon said ‘we have to be ever more vigilant’ to stop import of variants
Nicola Sturgeon was scrambling to contain a vaccines crisis in Scotland tonight after the country’s jab rollout slumped to a new daily low.
Just 9,628 patients received their first vaccine dose yesterday, the fewest since the Scottish Government began publishing figures on January 11.
Scotland currently has the lowest rate of vaccine coverage of any of the four UK nations, with 575,987 doses administered to date.
It came as Ms Sturgeon prepares to introduce a tough new quarantine for international arrivals to Scotland that goes further than Boris Johnson in England.
Facing the media today Ms Sturgeon admitted vaccination numbers were ‘simply falling off a bit on a Sunday’ but did not give any further explanation.
She insisted the programme was ‘ahead of schedule’ to give vaccines to all over-80s by Friday, with 80 per cent of their first doses administered so far. In care homes, 98 per cent of residents and 88 per cent of staff have now received a dose of the vaccine.
But Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: ‘Today’s daily vaccination figures are the lowest yet.
‘The SNP’s slow Covid vaccine rollout is lagging miles behind the rest of the UK. They’re letting Scotland down at the biggest challenge facing us.’
Just 9,628 patients received their first vaccine dose yesterday, the fewest since the Scottish Government began publishing figures on January 11
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: ‘The SNP’s slow Covid vaccine rollout is lagging miles behind the rest of the UK. They’re letting Scotland down at the biggest challenge facing us’
Facing questions about why Scotland appeared to be rolling out its vaccination programme at a slower pace than across the rest of the UK, Ms Sturgeon said: ‘There’s a long way to go in this programme and it’s really important we do it methodically, sustainably – concentrating on the most vulnerable first.
‘That’s what we have been doing and I think as we go through this week we will see further evidence that is what is happening.’
She also claimed the Government had ‘adapted our estimates’ since the Health Secretary said a million people could be vaccinated by the end of January, but it was ‘firmly on track’ with the revised targets for over-70s and the most clinically vulnerable.
Scotland has entered the second phase of its plan to give the population a vaccine to combat coronavirus with two new mass vaccination centres opening on Monday.
The facilities at Aberdeen’s P&J Live venue and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) will be able to inoculate an extra 27,000 people per week.
NHS staff spent last week vaccinating each other as part of their inductions at the centres.
Ms Sturgeon will tomorrow outline Scotland’s new quarantine plan, which goes further than Boris Johnson’s hotel quarantine for arrivals from ‘red list’ states with high levels of Covid-19
She said today that Scotland had to ‘be ever more vigilant in trying to stop the virus coming into the country’.
‘To reduce the risk of the virus entering the country, as you know, we have already agreed with other countries across the UK to introduce supervised quarantine from some countries,’ she said.
‘However, as I said last week, in our view the current UK-wide proposals don’t go far enough so tomorrow we will provide some more information about the extent to which we intend to operate supervised quarantine here in Scotland.
‘We will also set out some additional measures we are working on to make current travel restrictions more effective than they are already.’
Source: Read Full Article
