Coronavirus: Island of Man outbreak is a warning for Scotland's islands

Schools, bars and restaurants are open, and face coverings are no longer required outdoors.

Only a continued ban on tourism - the main source of income for some residents - offers a clue to the ongoing threat from Covid.

Corvo, the smallest of the Azores, has recorded just one case of coronavirus during the pandemic - in a local who had visited the mainland for Christmas.

The Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, have largely escaped as coronavirus swept through mainland Portugal

With no hospital beds and just one ventilator an outbreak would have been devastating.

"We were very afraid that someone would come and contaminate all of us, like off a boat," Goreti Melo, one of the island's two nurses, told the news agency AFP this week.

The island's mayor, Jose Manuel Silva, added: "The spread would have been disastrous and very rapid. We only have one bakery so inevitably we all go to the same places."

READ MORE: Covid reinfection risk 'higher than previously thought'

The experience of Corvo sums up the unique protection from, and vulnerability to, the virus faced by small island communities.

This week Nicola Sturgeon suggested that Scotland's Level Three islands "will have the option" to move into Level Two restrictions from the end of April, enabling a faster return to more socialising and reopening of hospitality.

Exactly what Level Two could entail at this stage remains subject to review (previously, for example, it would have meant a 10.30pm curfew for pubs and a maximum of four people from two households mixing in one another's homes).

One thing that it probably would mean though, as the First Minister stated, is "restrictions on mainland travel to protect against importation of the virus".

Travel restrictions could be imposed between the mainland and island communities to protect them from new cases being imported

In effect, while other Scots would be free to travel all over mainland Scotland and stay in hotels and guest houses, islanders would not be allowed to holiday on the mainland nor tourists permitted to visit the islands (not without quarantine anyway).

For more normal life domestically, residents of Orkney, Shetland, Tiree, Mull - or any of Scotland's other islands - must pay the price of travel.

It is, on a smaller scale, exactly how New Zealand and Taiwan insulated themselves from the virus - and how the UK might have, if we had closed our borders in January or February last year.

READ MORE: 'Up to one in four' adults in Scotland now have Covid antibodies

Quarantine is one option, of course: require all visitors to the island to produce evidence of a negative test and make everyone - including islanders returning from a trip to the mainland - enter managed self-isolation for 10 days, with testing to ensure any imported infections are stopped in their tracks.

Scotland's islands might not be fully immunised in the way Corvo is, but they are well above the national average (largely thanks to having disproportionately older populations compared to the mainland).

To date, two thirds (66.2 per cent) of all over-16s on the Western Isles have had at least one vaccine dose, compared to 44.5% of those in Scotland as a whole.

On Shetland, the figure is 63.6% and on Orkney, 61.5%.

Shetland and Orkney, along with Iona, Islay, Jura, Mull, Oronsay, Tiree, and Ulva in Argyll and Bute and most of the islands in the Highlands region, are already living under Level Three; only Skye and the Western Isles are Level Four.

To some, continuing restrictions at all seems harsh - especially if travel were curbed.

Orkney has had no new cases of Covid at all since mid-February. Shetland has recorded six in the past week among its 23,000 inhabitants (a seven-day case rate of 26.2 per 100,000), while the Western Isles has detected just one (a case rate of 3.7 per 100,000).

On the basis of the World Health Organisation 'situational levels', that should make Orkney and the Western Isles Level Zero, and Shetland Level One.

Cumulatively, since the pandemic began, Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles combined have had 582 cases and 21 deaths in a population of 516,000.

Island communities, with larger proportions of elderly people, have vaccinated more of their populations

New Zealand - with ten times the population - has had just 26 deaths, although it is an unfair comparison when Scotland's islanders rely so heavily on the mainland for healthcare: one of the 11 islanders who died on Shetland, 91-year-old Willie Smith, contracted the virus after being sent to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary for a heart scan.

Small islands are also dependent on a few shared amenities. A single supermarket, bakery or butcher's shop, and a couple of cash machines, can be hotbeds for transmission.

READ MORE: Schools 'may have led' to increase in infections among parents and grandparents

The island of Barra went from detecting its first case just after Christmas to a "major outbreak" of at least 50 cases by January 27, enough to tip the nearest hospital on neighbouring Lewis to capacity with a peak of 10 Covid patients.

Fragile services and elderly populations are some of the reasons why - even with very low case rates - abandoning restrictions altogether can be risky for island communities.

The current crisis engulfing the Isle of Man is a cautionary tale.

The island closed its borders to non-residents in February 2020, with 14-day mandatory quarantine for all arrivals, but otherwise enjoyed normal life.

There was no social distancing, no requirement for face coverings, and schools and businesses remained open.

The Isle of Man closed its borders in 2020 but has been otherwise largely free of restrictions during the pandemic

This made sense when case rates were low, but also provided a perfect breeding ground when the virus slipped in undetected.

In February, a cluster of more than 100 cases was traced to an infected ferry crew member and by March 3 the island was plunged into lockdown.

On Thursday, hospital admissions for Covid hit a record high with 23 patients needing treatment, four in intensive care.

Yesterday marked a year to the day since the island had identified its first case.

Of the 1,411 since then, 975 have occurred in the current outbreak.