NICOLA Sturgeon has rejected claims that the Scottish Government covered up what could be the country’s first coronavirus outbreak.

Last week, a BBC investigation revealed that at least 25 people linked to a conference held by Nike in Edinburgh on February 26 and 27 had been struck down by the virus.

Over the weekend, it emerged that staff at two other firms had fallen ill after coming into contact with delegates from the event.

One of the companies is a digital marketing business in Glasgow that shares an office with the global sports brand.

The other is a kilt hire shop in the capital which fitted 10 conference goers.

Last night Sky News revealed that Lloyds Banking Group had also been at the same venue as Nike at the same time.

None of the businesses were contacted by health officials.

READ MORE: Coronavirus spread in Scotland by Nike employees before first case

Labour says the lack of contact and the lack of publicity calls into question the Government’s commitment to contact tracing.

The First Minister said details were not made public at the time because of strict patient confidentiality guidelines.

Speaking at the daily government briefing yesterday, the First Minister asked what ministers would have to gain from not disclosing information.

Sturgeon said: “At a point when numbers of cases are very low, and at a point when we have an event that very, very few people were at, the issues around patient confidentiality are really important.

“I would simply ask people, what would have been the motive for not putting more information into the public domain should it have been possible to do so?

“We were all trying to deal as best we could with a virus, so I would just caution people latching on to emotive phrases like ‘covering things up’.

“Why would we have been doing any of that?”

Labour’s shadow secretary of state for Scotland, Ian Murray, said the First Minister’s decision to cite patient confidentiality was “unfounded in terms of law”.

In a letter to the SNP leader, the Edinburgh South MP says the “decision not to disclose such vital information, to which my constituents and the country as a whole were entitled, was not based on any legal requirement but was purely a matter of judgement about whether it was ‘necessary’”.

He said sharing information about the outbreak “which was at that time by far the biggest in the UK involving a transmission rate on one to 25 – would have transformed public perceptions, safeguarded my constituents and led nationally to an acceleration of counter-measures.”

Murray said the making the news public would have assisted in the “tracking and tracing of all those potentially infected”.

Meanwhile, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman has promised that 2000 contact tracers will be ready and working by June 1.

She told the BBC there were already 600 people in place. Trials began on Monday.