A PUBLIC health professor at Edinburgh University has warned that the UK has “been slow” in ramping up capacity for contact tracing- which will play a major role as lockdown measures are relaxed.
Professor Linda Bauld, said that bot the Scottish and UK Governments needed to “increased those numbers quickly so we are ready to go” in the next stage of tackling the pandemic.
Speaking on Sunday Politics Scotland, she added: “The test, trace and isolate approach, which so many of us have been advocating is well developed in public health, generally.
“To focus on the UK, not just Scotland, when we were in the early stages of this epidemic, what we call the containment phase, we were doing contact tracing. Then that stopped.“
I guess questions are being asked about why we didn’t build up our capacity over the last six weeks intensively, for example, so that we would be in a place now when governments start to announce gradual easing of lockdown - to ramp up contact tracing.”
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman stressed that the test, trace and isolate method is a “critical component as we come out of the current restrictions”.
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She added: “In this coming week, we will publish our overall strategy, the work that we have got well underway now to increase capacity, not only in terms of testing...but we need to increase that capacity even further to meet what we anticipate to be the demand.
“It’s also about the capacity of contact tracing and then the very difficult issue that is part of that which is asking people to isolate.
“All of that will be published in the early part of the coming week about this strategy we are adopting, the tools that we will use - both human and digital.”
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