The First Minister says she is doing everything possible to control the coronavirus while keeping schools open and avoiding the “very restrictive form of isolation” of reintroducing shielding for the most vulnerable people.

Speaking at today’s daily briefing, Nicola Sturgeon said she would prefer that the “burden of keeping this virus under control” is shared across all ages – and that asking one section of population to bear most of the burden of keeping the virus under control is not responsible.

Shielding was paused at the end of August, after around 180,000 people had been advised not to leave their homes since March.

The government said this was because there were lower levels of the virus circulating in the community and the risk of catching the virus was now minimal.

“There is a school of thought out there, the herd immunity school of thought, that says that we protect the older, more vulnerable. That we isolate them, and everybody else goes about their normal business, get the virus and nobody has to worry about it,” she said.

“I just don’t buy that for a whole range of practical and ethical reasons. You can’t just isolate a whole section of the population indefinitely.

“Practically you can’t do that. We live integrated lives, people live in houses with older people and younger people. But ethically we can’t just effectively put up a whole section of our population in a corner and forget about their quality of life and their wellbeing.

“So it’s not practical or ethical from that point of view.”

Ms Sturgeon continued:

“It is based on, in my view, this complete fallacy that, for younger healthier people, this virus is nothing to worry about.

“For a lot of people that may be true, but none of us know whether that’s going to be us or not and there are a lot young healthy people who have had this virus who are [three to six] months on, still dealing with the health implications of it. And there have been young people who have ended up in intensive care and sadly died.

“This is a nasty virus and right now it is not, in my view, for somebody like me in a leadership position to simply say isolate one section of the population and let everybody else get it. For a whole range of reasons that is not a responsible thing to do.

“So I’m afraid, however difficult this is, we are all in this together and were all going to have to shoulder some of the burden of keeping this virus under control for the collective good of all of us.

“And that is tough for all of us but, unfortunately, it’s going to be necessary. I hope we can do in that way without having to advise people to shield again.”

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