A thread. Is @NicolaSturgeon as shiny and clean on COVID-19 as she's now trying to make out? From her tone of disdain towards @BorisJohnson and his new slogan you'd be forgiven for thinking Scotland was some shining pandemic success. But is it?
2./ Last night's shocking exposé by @BBCMarkDaly on @BBCDisclosure suggests Sturgeon and her top officials followed the line from London slavishly throughout at the cost of a greater loss of Scottish lives. But it may be worse than even that. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…
3./ The reason Sturgeon is so important is her projection of competence gave cover to Boris throughout. If you didn't believe in bumbling Boris you knew you could at least trust the icy-cool focus and energy of the Queen of the North. Except it now turns out you couldn't.
4./ All along she claimed to be driven by the science, (some of it no doubt delivered from her ex-CMO's second home in Fife). All of that advice we now know effectively rubber-stamped London's. Any deviations were tiny in number and insignificant in impact.
5./ On the 12th March, for example, she made clear the crowd size limit of 500 people (compared to England's 5000) was NOT about reducing transmission but only to take stress off the NHS because in Scotland paramedics had to attend above that level. 👇itv.com/news/2020-03-1…
6./ And while much attention has been rightly focused on the UK govt not intervening to stop the Cheltehham Festival on the 13th March, the Scottish govt did nothing to stop the Six Nations Scotland v France rugby game just 5 days earlier. 👇
7./ I was in Edinburgh on the 8th March and the city was full of French supporters getting ready to cram tightly into Murrayfield with its capacity crowd of 67 000 people. We now know that singing is a perfect way to transmit this virus. 👇latimes.com/world-nation/s…
8./ Virus particles are thrown much further and sucked in by other people more deeply than normal as this German doctor warns. 👇 What a tragic irony that Scots & our Auld Alliance friends by singing our anthems were so much at risk of catching the virus. slippedisc.com/2020/04/german…
9./ Sturgeon's constant kow towing to London led to one of the most telling moments in the BBC film where on 10th March the Scottish govt highlighted its approach of testing and contact tracing only two days later to drop it to fall into line with Westminster.
10./ We won't know for some time why exactly London got its early response wrong. There are questions about whether it stuck too rigidly to a long standing flu pandemic model and why they didn't (or couldn't) pivot to a Taiwan style test and contact trace quickly enough.
11./ There may also be practical reasons why London then dropped contact tracing. Unlike with SARS, in COVID-19 asymptomatics can be highly infective. In England the sheer number of cases may simply have overwhelmed test and trace capacity. But was that really true in Scotland?
12./ It's telling that public health experts, such as @AllysonPollock have had no reply to their urgent emails from mid March warning them not to drop contact tracing, which they believed to be a fundamental tool.
13./ It's also telling that the Scottish govt can point to NO significant or specific achievement of its own during the pandemic. The same problems, the same issues. And the same smoke and mirrors. If you think @MattHancock and his 100 000 tests in the post was dodgy....
14./ Try to get to the truth about PPE provision in care homes in Scotland. @JeaneF1MSP 's contradictory guidance and obfuscatory claims mark a new level of gobbledygook At one stage care workers were told masks need only be worn when dealing with an infected resident.
15./ Given testing in homes was non existent who was to decide who's infected? In some places 73% of care home residents are now testing positive. Sure, mistakes can be made but denying there was a problem for so long made this one much worse. thetimes.co.uk/article/infect…
16. So should we trust the lockdown defiance of @NicolaSturgeon now she's finally decided to cock a tiny snook at London? Maybe not, because there's an intriguing mystery about the Scottish number of deaths. Guess what country they're worse than?
17./ For weeks the media has been united in its loathing of the Swedes and their relatively liberal lockdown policy. How very dare they get haircuts and drink in their overpriced bars. Manufacturing, construction, restaurants and gyms remain open with social distancing. And yet..
18./ More people are dying per million population in Scotland. Sweden's population is 10.2M, Scotland's 5.4M. Deaths as of 11th May in Sweden: 3258, Scotland: 1912. So the death rate per million is 319 in Sweden. Scotland: 354 International comparisons are difficult, but...
19./ While the population density of Sweden is indeed less than Scotland's 85% of its population is urban and Stockholm is 3 times bigger than Scotland's biggest and most populous city, Glasgow. England (and London) in terms of density are total outliers by comparison.
20./ And by the way all this is probably flattering Sturgeon's pandemic performance. The death figures I quoted above only include those tested for COVID. Death certificate figures from the ONR include well over 1000 more. Can we trust the Swedish figures then?
21./ Sweden attributes more untested deaths to COVID than the UK does. When the Economist compared death stats from COVID with excess deaths this year compared to previous years Sweden's were one of the closest. 👇economist.com/europe/2020/05…
22./ While Sweden's stats accounted for 91% of excess deaths the UK's were 54%. If I was an MSP I'd be asking for the equivalent Scottish figure. It takes a particular sort of genius for a country to deliver worse outcomes than the most liberal approach to the pandemic in Europe.
23./ So is sticking with stricter lockdown now just Sturgeon playing to the gallery or is it really going to pay dividends for Scotland? Maybe not when so far her more bossy, puritanical but incompetent approach compares so badly with Sweden's. And there's a twist in the tail.
24./ Immunity in Stockholm is now estimated at over 20%. It's predicted to be 40% by the end of May. Glasgow may have immunity levels around 3%. If and when that COVID-19 second wave hits us which city will be worse affected? ft.com/content/a2b4c1…
25./ And which country may be in a better position economically to pay for any response? Scotland has massive problems of deprivation. The beating engine of economic growth is more likely to help assist that than yet more unemployment and poverty caused by throttling the economy.
