First Minister admits concern at failure to contact thousand of Scots with coronavirus

The First Minister has admitted it is a concern that contact tracers were unable to contact more than 3,500 people in Scotland who tested positive for coronavirus.

However, responding to questions from opposition leaders at Holyrood, Nicola Sturgeon said the failure was not down to the Test and Protect contact tracing system, which she said is performing to an “exceptionally good” standard.

Instead, she said the issue was people not answering phone calls or responding to text messages from contact tracers.

She stressed there is a “personal responsibility” to do this.

But Ms Sturgeon faced calls to “get a grip” on Test and Protect after figures showed since June 22 a total of 3,512 individuals with a positive test were unable to be contacted.

Public Health Scotland said this was 6% of those who had tested positive, describing it as a “very small proportion” of the overall number of cases.

It has also emerged a “coding error” was responsible for overestimating the number of people contacted within 24 hours of testing positive for the virus.

Both Scottish Conservative Holyrood leader Ruth Davidson and Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard challenged Ms Sturgeon on this at First Minister's Questions on Thursday.

Mr Leonard said: “The most recent reports from Public Health Scotland show that there have been thousands, 3,500 people to be precise, who have tested positive but have not been interviewed by Test and Protect, 400 in the past week alone.

“Is the First Minister seriously telling Scotland that this shows Test and Protect is working well?

“Isn't it showing it is desperately short of resources and that the Government needs to get a grip?”

Speaking about confirmed Covid-19 cases who had not been spoken to, Ms Sturgeon accepted “of course that is a concern”.

But she added: “But it is simply and factually wrong to describe that as a failure of Test and Protect of somehow down to a lack of resources.”

Ms Davidson argued: “I think it's wrong for the First Minister not to acknowledge that for eight consecutive weeks at the start of the Covid second wave we were not meeting those targets.

“And we didn't know we were missing them because of this data error.”

The Scottish Conservative leader also asked about the use of text messages by the Test and Protect team to reach close contacts of people confirmed as having coronavirus.

Ms Sturgeon said a “mix of SMS text messages and telephone calls” are used for this work.

She added: “Sometimes SMS messages are used for speed of contact but around 40% of close contacts are actually telephoned.”

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