Coronavirus in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon to share thinking on lockdown exit 'in coming days'

She said possible options included lifting the restrictions in phases, with different parts of the country and the economy potentially re-opening at different speeds.

However she stressed no firm decisions had yet been taken, and a uniform relaxation of the measures might ultimately prove simplest.

The current lockdown of schools and businesses, now in its fourth week, has seen a slowing of admissions to hospitals and ICU patient numbers in recent days.

However it has also brought forecasts of a catastrophic 35 per cent reduction in the UK economy if it continues to the summer. It is expected to last at least six weeks.

Ms Sturgeon reported the number of people in hospital in Scotland with Covid-19 had dropped overnight by 53 to 1748, while the number in intensive care was down one to 195.

She said: “These hospital and ICU figures do give us cause for some very cautious optimism at this stage – but I want to caution again that it is too early to be definitive about that. 

“So my caution is not against cautious optimism but against reading too much into these figures at this point.”

Ms Sturgeon said she didn’t know what the future held with coronavirus, but said it would not disappear anytime soon, and the long-term strategy would be to “manage and suppress” it. 

She said: “What is it we need to see in terms of the spread of the virus before we could start to think of lifting these measures?

“Obviously we want to see transmission suppressed as much as possible, hospitalisations, ICU numbers, and deaths falling.

“What then could you look to do in terms of lifting some of these measures? 

“What impact would that have on the spread of the virus?

“Are there some measures you could lift earlier than others or are there different stratifications you could have - and please don’t take this as decisions, these are the different factors that come to play - could you have different approaches for different groups of the population, or different kinds of business for example.

“These are the kinds of things we are starting to think through.”

She said the virus would still need to be suppressed in future, and if there was no longer a lockdown, that suppression would have to come through a vaccine and other treatments.

She expected the future strategy to include “test, trace and isolate”, the rigorous form of contact tracing that has helped South Korea and other Asian countries contain Covid-19.

Asked if Scotland’s islands communities could comes out of lockdown ahead of busier cities, Ms Sturgeon said: “We are still at a relatively early stage of looking at the options. 

“The important thing right now is making sure the lockdown is having the effect in suppressing the virus and getting the evidence of that.

“But, yes, we are starting to think about the different options, and we have been thinking about the different options for coming out of this, when that is appropriate to do.

“That could be different measures at different times, it could be different groups of the population at different times, but these are all ‘ifs’ at the moment.

“We’ve got to look at what any approach would do in terms of spread of the virus, the practicality of things, the ease of reintroducing things if we suddenly decided that was necessary, and of course the simplicity of messaging.

“The simplest way of telling people what they need to do is if we’re giving the same message to every part of the country rather than have geographic variations.

“But if the evidence tells us we need to do something different then of course that’s what we’ll do, because we need to do what is required. 

For sometime all of it will involve asking the public to live their lives in ways different to what we are all used to. So we will continue to be open about this as our thinking develops.”