The devil’s in the R detail for Scotland’s response to Covid-19– Alex Cole-Hamilton

In a national crisis, clarity of message is essential and, since the start of this emergency, we have broadly had that across the four governments of the UK. Until now.

The tension this weekend over the route map out of lockdown is the first wobble in what had to that point been a unified four-nation response.

For the best part of two months, the different administrations have walked in lock step and done a pretty good job of keeping the political point scoring out of it. Nicola Sturgeon had refused to criticise the Whitehall response to coronavirus, because it had largely been identical to the response of St Andrew’s House.

A tirade from SNP Westminster leader, Ian Blackford on social media on Sunday morning signalled the end to that fragile peace and a divergence first in message and then in policy. The briefing around Downing Street’s new “stay alert” message, leaked to the press overnight, was a disastrous exercise in public relations.

It was parodied and pilloried from the outset. The idea that you could ‘stay alert and control the virus’ made the virus sound like some kind of flying parasite or mutant tadpole you could dodge or ward off, providing you were paying attention and had some skill with a net.

The statement that evening from the Prime Minister set the stay alert slogan in context. It wasn’t quite the act of “buffoonery” that Ian Blackford had trailed it to be. An avalanche-style alert system grading risk from one to five may well help the public better understand where we are in the crisis. There was the beginnings of a road map out of lockdown in it and critically one which will offer people some degree of hope around seeing people they care about and even getting the kids back to school. I can tell you, from the contents of my mail bag, that Scottish people now want to understand our route to those things as well.

But the damage to the clarity of message had already been done. Sturgeon was quick to pounce on that. As early as last week, the First Minister had sensed that the UK Government might move away from the stay at home line and made it clear that she could not follow suit. Why? Because, she assured us, the R number (the rate of infection) in Scotland was still higher than in the rest of the UK. That sounds like a scientific basis for the variance in policy then? Well it’s not that simple.

Because we are testing even fewer people per capita than England – on Sunday there were only 2,346 tests in Scotland compared to nearly 100k in England – we’ve no hope of obtaining an accurate R number.

You can only properly understand the rate of infection for a disease if you test every patient who has contracted the virus, trace all the people that they have come in to contact with and then test them.

Only then can you work out how many additional people each COVID positive patient is infecting. As such, the R number that the First Minister describes in Scotland has a huge margin of error, it’s guesswork and we are basing our variance from UK policy on a rough estimate.

Since the start of the crisis, many in the SNP have struggled to contain their anxiety at our one-UK approach to public health in this emergency. They will be breathing a sigh of relief now that we seem to be going a different way.

I’ve no problem if Scotland chooses to move to exit lockdown at a different rate, but I want to understand the scientific basis for that deviation, because at no point should politics be the driving force in our response to this public health emergency.

Making this an accurate science depends on a vast system of test and trace. The countries that have got on top of the virus have depended on it, but it is something no part of the UK is ready for yet.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is the Lib Dem MSP for Edinburgh Western