THE day before the UK went into lockdown, most knew it was coming. They had seen the pictures from Italy of Covid-19 patients lying limply on army camp beds, sensed the shockwaves as Scottish children were sent home from school, felt the fear of the unknown.

Many heeded advice to make Mother’s Day meet-ups online. But in public spaces there was a time lag, as people struggled to get their heads round social distance. For Craig Dalzell, Common Weal’s head of policy and research, going food shopping that Sunday with his partner was an uncomfortable experience.

“The shop was far too crowded and almost no-one was following physical distancing rules,” he remembers. “We both left that shop feeling concerned.” Within days both had symptoms – he is convinced it’s where they were infected.

While his partner only had a cough, sore throat and was well in three days, Dalzell could barely leave bed for a week, and the breathlessness and extreme fatigue lasted long after other symptoms dissipated.

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Now recovered, he – like many across Scotland who were not unwell enough to go to hospital and so were not tested – can only assume that he’s had the virus. “In the absence of community testing we just don’t know who has had the virus or if anyone has immunity,” he says.

His experience also helped inform Lockdown: the cost of a comprehensive testing-based strategy for re-opening Scotland, a policy paper published on April 9, calling for wide scale community testing.

Before he was unwell Scotland had the capacity to carry out only 350 tests per day. But in recent weeks it’s been ramped up dramatically, with the aim of being able to do some 12,000 tests per day by the middle of this month.

Friday was T-day with briefings by both Scottish and UK Governments focused on those testing targets.

The National: Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Matt Hancock (Victoria Jones/PA)

Matt Hancock (above), UK Health Secretary, proudly announced 122,347 tests had been carried out as of April 30, claiming the UK Government had exceeded its 100,000 target.

But even as he boosted of putting the “audacious goal” in the back of the net, it was emerging that the goal posts had moved to include tests sent out to homes and testing sites. If counting had been done as it was previously, the total would have been less than 82,000.

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the Scottish Government had also met its 3500 target to perform 4350 tests a day. When combined with the additional UK-wide capacity in Scotland, provided by the Lighthouse Labs, Scotland’s testing capacity is now 8350.

Both governments stressed that building capacity was key to the test, trace and isolate system. More detail on how this will be done in Scotland is due to be announced by Sturgeon this week.

That final point comes as a relief to Dalzell. His paper puts heavy emphasis on the human contact element of tracing and puts the total cost of the model at £1-1.5billion for 12 months. It claims that economic and social harms could cost 10 times that if such a strategy is not employed.

“Many of our activists have been lobbying hard on it and I’m glad it’s happening now,” he adds. “There is really no way out of lockdown without it.”

But like some others, he believes more effort should have gone into increasing testing capacity at an earlier stage.

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Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, said: “I think we haven’t moved as fast as we could.

“There were machines available and there was expertise in research and university labs that could have been brought in earlier than they were.”

IT’S evidence of a system that is creaking, he suggests. He is frustrated too with former chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood’s claims back in early April that community testing was “a distraction”.

“I disagree fundamentally with that and I don’t know where she was getting that information from,” he says. “I thought that was a bad mistake.

“Clearly if you don’t know where the virus is you don’t know who is dangerous. And the symptoms are such a poor guide – they shouldn’t be a criteria for having a test.

“If you test on that basis you are missing lots of cases and you’re not going to be getting a grip on the virus.”

He believes that the scientific advice was given on the basis of capacity. “You can’t advise something that can’t be done. So it went along the lines of it’s a red herring and so on. Well, it wasn’t.”

He also has concerns about the gap between capacity and testing, and says there is now an urgent need to take testing to the people rather than expect people to come to the testing centres.

“We have a major care home problem and it would be really helpful if someone was standing outside care homes on a regular basis to take samples,” he says. “Really we need a fleet for people doing that.”

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There’s a need too, many argue, for more localised information. “Where are the hotspots?” asks Pennington. “We know we have them in old folks’ homes and many have been named but I would also like to know, say in Aberdeen, if the 200 cases are evenly spread out across the town or are there parts of the city where there are more? If you know that you can target your contact tracing on those parts where the virus might still be very busy.”

And that, he says, helps to keep the R number [the reproductive number of people the virus is passed to] under control. The aim is for governments to keep it below one.

Professor Rowland Kao, a mathematical biologist from Edinburgh University, says testing “is always a good idea”. But what’s different as we start to look towards easing off the lockdown restrictions is that we now have a greater capacity to carry that out.

In her briefing the First Minister admitted that for this stage to be rolled out, testing capacity has to be ramped far further still. Professor Kao claims that if Scotland were tracing the contacts of all its currently confirmed cases, it would be looking at about 10,000 cases a day. Estimates on the numbers of contact tracing needed range between 20 and 38 per positive case.

What the lockdown has done, he claims, is bought us time. “One of the reason to do things slowly is that it gives you time to assess what then happens,” he says. “So after lockdown it was at least two to three weeks before there was any signal that it was working. Now we need 95% confidence that numbers are going down.”

BUT he is also noticing that, though lockdown may not have lifted, traffic is going up. Car journeys are still 70% below normal levels but rose by up to 10% last week, according to Transport Scotland said. Concessionary bus journeys, 90% lower than normal levels two weeks ago, increased by almost 17%.

“What you are seeing is either people finding ways to work within the restrictions, which they weren’t doing previously or they are just tired of it,” says Kao. “It might not be that people are breaking the rules but that they needed to do something – see a relative who wasn’t well for example – but delayed it. But if those things are happening now it will be about two weeks before we understand what these things are doing.”

He claims modelling is never based on 100% compliance – some people will do more than is required, a few will do less. “So you are going to get a mix, and what you find is that it is the average that is driving things forward.”

But unless things take a turn for the worse – fears of a multi-inflammatory disease in children associated with Covid-19 that emerged from London hospitals last week are substantiated for example, or deaths rise again – people may get increasingly anxious for lockdown to lift.

“Where I live there is no evidence of the disease at all,” he says. “You have people who have been suck inside for a long time, central messages that the peak is on the way down, and it’s pretty obvious that people will start to do more.”

Linda Bauld, behavioural scientist and professor of public health at Edinburgh University, agrees on the need to ramp-up testing. “It’s going to be difficult to get to 10,000 a day but it’s not a million miles away from what we have to get to,” she says.

She too thinks it’s important to keep people’s attitudes to lockdown firmly in mind. Office of National Statistics (ONS) data on coronavirus and the social impact shows there’s been about a 3% decline in level of concern in the public about the pandemic, she says, with just under 82% now reporting they are worried.

Though compliance holds steady at about 84%, that still means some are not falling the guidance. “That’s probably a portion of people going out several times a day,” she says. “Not all of them are having a house party. But the longer the restraints go on the greater the risk that not everyone is going to follow the rules.”

Governments have a difficult job to do in terms of balancing the need to give people hope, with the need to assert strong messages about following lockdown restrictions, she admits.

NICOLA Sturgeon has followed up last month’s “grown-up conversation” around how to end lockdown with firm warnings about “the fragility” of progress on Friday.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson has used the same information to declare the UK past the peak and floated the idea that “social bubbles” – where people could meet with one other household to relieve social isolation.

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The difficulty, says Bauld, is it is human nature for some to think if they are to be allowed to meet someone in a couple of weeks, then they could perhaps start doing that now. “But the implications are that if people start to do that too early then the R number could go back up”, she warns.

And when restrictions do start to lift, much more detailed guidance will be needed. “At the start of lock down I was doing radio phone-ins where people were asking: ‘Am I able to go to my allotment?’, ‘Am I able to drive a short distance to go for a walk’ – lots of stuff, which at that stage I had no clue what the Government meant.

“So if we do start to say you can go to your local park and talk to a few people, or this social bubble idea is introduced, we need to be very clear. What we need is frequently asked questions, which means advisers sitting down and thinking through the scenarios.”

There is lots of scope for Scotland to do things differently if necessary, she says, particularly as both health and educations are devolved. And the Scottish economy has unique traits too. What, for example, does this mean for oil and gas, she wonders? More localised lockdowns or restrictions could be necessary in response to future spikes, as “unpalatable” as they might be.

Meanwhile for Common Weal’s Dalzell, the key thing is use caution until we can ensure widespread testing. “Not having been tested, I am not assuming that I’ve definitely had Covid and I’m not assuming that I’ll be immune,” he says.

“But I’m more concerned about others not treating this as real or thinking that it’s happening elsewhere. Until that changes, the lockdown is just going to get extended further and more people are going to fall ill.”