BOOMING coronavirus cases in Scotland are "having an impact" on care homes, with more than 120 experiencing an outbreak, the Health Secretary has said.
Humza Yousaf said "difficult decisions" have to be made to protect residents, but stressed the rights of relatives are "absolutely paramount".
Care homes were badly hit during early stages of the pandemic, with ministers admitting mistakes were made.
Giving evidence to Holyrood's Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, Mr Yousaf said: "The circumstances that we find ourselves in at the moment with high levels of community transmission are having an impact on our care sector.
"We have, at last count I saw yesterday, over 120 care homes that have an outbreak of Covid in them.
"That's not an insignificant number, and therefore difficult decisions have to be made.
"But I can promise you that myself and my colleague, [social care minister] Kevin Stewart, we're looking at this on a daily basis, to try to ensure that the rights of care home relatives are absolutely paramount, but while considering also the complex safety issues involved in care homes."
More than 7,000 new coronavirus cases were recorded yesterday in Scotland — an increase on Sunday's figure of 6,368 and the seventh day in a row the total has been above 6,000.
Earlier this year, Mr Yousaf's predecessor Jeane Freeman said the Scottish Government had failed to understand the social care sector well enough.
She told a BBC podcast: "We wanted people who didn't need to stay in hospital any longer, because they'd been treated and they were clinically well, to be discharged as quickly as possible so we freed up those beds for Covid patients.
"Remember, the early predictions about the number of people going into hospital were terrifying actually.
"But we didn't take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital going into care homes were as safe as they could be and that was a mistake.
"Now, I might argue we couldn't do anything other than we did and all the rest of it. But it still created a real problem for those older people and for the others who lived in care homes and for the staff who worked in care homes."
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