Nicola Sturgeon has threatened to introduce new laws against travelling for leisure outside local areas after widespread breaches of Scotland’s lockdown rules at the weekend.
The first minister accused thousands of people who travelled more than five miles from their homes to beauty spots and beaches of putting lives at risk and increasing the chances of a second surge in Covid-19 cases and a much longer lockdown.
Scotland’s lockdown guidance was eased on Friday to allow people to travel more than five miles from home to see family, and to meet up to eight people from another household outside.
She said Police Scotland issued nearly 800 dispersal notices on Saturday, five times more than the previous Saturday, with reports of people camping overnight, or travelling with caravans and camper vans.
With the country experiencing a heatwave, the government agency Transport Scotland said traffic levels on Sunday were 70% higher than last weekend, and 60% higher on Saturday. On the A82 at Loch Lomond and in Glen Coe, traffic was 200% higher than the previous weekend.
Police ran a checkpoint at Drymen near Loch Lomond, an area where there has been some of Scotland’s highest rates of lockdown breaches, and turned back drivers who did not live nearby.
Sturgeon said traffic data was worrying since progress suppressing the pandemic was still fragile. She said she was rethinking her decision to trust people to understand the rules and uphold them voluntarily or use discretion wisely.
“I have a duty to be clear with you that if there is continued evidence of even a minority of people not abiding by these guidelines and travelling unnecessarily, we will have to put these restrictions on group sizes and travel distance into law,” Sturgeon told Monday’s daily coronavirus press briefing.
“We won’t hesitate to do that if we think that’s necessary for the collective safety and wellbeing of the population ... Cases could increase again – it wouldn’t take too much for that to happen, and if that happens then that will result in more loss of life.”
In recent days the UK has seen a sudden sharp increase in Covid-19 infection numbers, leading to fears that a second wave of cases is beginning.
Epidemics of infectious diseases behave in different ways but the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than 50 million people is regarded as a key example of a pandemic that occurred in multiple waves, with the latter more severe than the first. It has been replicated – albeit more mildly – in subsequent flu pandemics. Until now that had been what was expected from Covid-19.
How and why multiple-wave outbreaks occur, and how subsequent waves of infection can be prevented, has become a staple of epidemiological modelling studies and pandemic preparation, which have looked at everything from social behaviour and health policy to vaccination and the buildup of community immunity, also known as herd immunity.
Is there evidence of coronavirus coming back in a second wave?
This is being watched very carefully. Without a vaccine, and with no widespread immunity to the new disease, one alarm is being sounded by the experience of Singapore, which has seen a sudden resurgence in infections despite being lauded for its early handling of the outbreak.
Although Singapore instituted a strong contact tracing system for its general population, the disease re-emerged in cramped dormitory accommodation used by thousands of foreign workers with inadequate hygiene facilities and shared canteens.
Singapore’s experience, although very specific, has demonstrated the ability of the disease to come back strongly in places where people are in close proximity and its ability to exploit any weakness in public health regimes set up to counter it.
In June 2020, Beijing suffered from a new cluster of coronavirus cases which caused authorities to re-implement restrictions that China had previously been able to lift. In the UK, the city of Leicester was unable to come out of lockdown because of the development of a new spike of coronavirus cases. Clusters also emerged in Melbourne, requiring a re-imposition of lockdown conditions.
What are experts worried about?
Conventional wisdom among scientists suggests second waves of resistant infections occur after the capacity for treatment and isolation becomes exhausted. In this case the concern is that the social and political consensus supporting lockdowns is being overtaken by public frustration and the urgent need to reopen economies.
However Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, says “‘Second wave’ isn’t a term that we would use at the current time, as the virus hasn’t gone away, it’s in our population, it has spread to 188 countries so far, and what we are seeing now is essentially localised spikes or a localised return of a large number of cases.”
The overall threat declines when susceptibility of the population to the disease falls below a certain threshold or when widespread vaccination becomes available.
In general terms the ratio of susceptible and immune individuals in a population at the end of one wave determines the potential magnitude of a subsequent wave. The worry is that with a vaccine still many months away, and the real rate of infection only being guessed at, populations worldwide remain highly vulnerable to both resurgence and subsequent waves.
In England, health experts have been fiercely critical of the UK government’s decision to quickly ease the lockdown and reopen schools, car showrooms and outdoor markets while infection and transmission rates remain too high.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has insisted there is enough evidence to justify those policies. While Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, conceded on Sunday it was a “delicate and dangerous moment”, Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary for England, said ministers were “reasonably confident” the new rules were correct.
