Nicola Sturgeon 'should have excluded areas with little Covid from Scottish household visit ban'

Nicola Sturgeon should have excluded swathes of rural Scotland with very few coronavirus cases from a "tough" national ban on household visits, the Scottish Secretary said yesterday.

Alister Jack said he felt sorry for people on the Western Isles or Shetland, where no new cases have been recorded for several days, after Ms Sturgeon imposed a national ban on visits to other households.

The Tory MP said he would have preferred her to follow the same "local lockdown" approach implemented in England, where restrictions on indoor gatherings are limited to areas with outbreaks.

But Ms Sturgeon said her national ban was "old-fashioned preventative action" that would help stop the virus spreading again to areas with few cases.

The First Minister said one of her main lessons from the past six months was "the mistake you can make is to wait until you have a large number of cases", and warned this would be followed by a rise in deaths.

The row broke out as Scotland recorded 486 more cases - the highest daily total yet - but none in Orkney, Shetland or the Western Isles. Dumfries and Galloway recorded four cases and the Highlands eight.

In contrast, the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board area had 224 new cases, Lanarkshire 107 and Lothian 57.

Ms Sturgeon extended across Scotland a ban on indoor household visits that previously applied to 1.75 million people in the west of Scotland, where cases have surged.

Her move came after Mr Jack accused her last week of devising different rules from Boris Johnson "for the sake of it" as they have not led to lower Covid rates north of the Border.

The Scottish Secretary said yesterday he "absolutely" stood by this allegation, although he accepted she had the right to take different decisions in devolved policy areas.

He said more than 10 million people living in areas of England with outbreaks were also barred from visiting other households, including around two million people in the North East.

But the Dumfries and Galloway MP said the UK Government was not adopting a "one-size-fits-all" approach south of the Border, with tougher measures in areas where the R number - the average number of people each carrier infects - is higher.

He said: "We're doing local lockdowns where necessary and I would say the R number is very high in certain parts of Scotland, very low in other parts of Scotland.

"I would feel sorry for the Western Isles and Shetland, for instance, on this household ban because there's very little prevalance of the virus up there.

"And if you're an elderly person and you're not able to have visits and you're lonely, my sympathy goes out to those people."

Mr Jack said the UK and Scottish governments were following the same approach on "pretty much everything else" but he would have preferred "a process that we've taken in England which is the local lockdown measures."

But Ms Sturgeon warned "it's too late to take action" by the time the number of cases has surged, with a lot of deaths "baked into the situation because you waited so long."

She said: "What we are trying to do is get ahead of that and put in place restrictions that hopefully mean Dumfries and Galloway never get a big number of cases again because we acted preventively.

"And that can be hard. I know there'll be people in Dumfries and Galloway, there'll be people in huge tracts of the Highlands just now, the islands in particular, saying 'we have hardly any cases, why are we having to live this way?'"