THE First Minister has responded to Aberdeen city council’s co-leaders after they suggested the area has been treated unfairly during the coronavirus crisis.
The Conservatives' Douglas Lumsden and Labour's Jenny Laing have previously said they feel the city had been “singled out” for stricter treatment, and are now concerned that they are included in Scotland-wide measures to limit the spread of Covid-19.
Last week Nicola Sturgeon announced there would be a Scotland-wide ban on entering other people’s homes and put in place a 10pm curfew on hospitality venues.
This ban on household visits was initially in place in Greater Glasgow and surrounding areas but was extended to the whole country.
READ MORE: Four key points from Nicola Sturgeon's coronavirus briefing
In August Aberdeen faced tighter coronavirus restrictions after a localised outbreak connected to several pubs and bars. The city’s hospitality was forced to close as public health teams raced to get a handle on the outbreak.
In a new letter Laing said the council is “disappointed that the First Minister’s blanket lockdown measures across Scotland are having a disproportionate effect on Aberdeen” after their tight restrictions earlier in the summer.
She called on the First Minister to share the Incident Management Team report and recommendations from the Greater Glasgow health board to explain why similar restrictions weren’t implemented there.
Sturgeon has previously explained that transmission of the virus in Glasgow was linked to domestic settings, according to Test and Protect.
Laing wrote: “The health and wellbeing of our citizens must always come first and that is why we supported the statutory restrictions imposed on Aberdeen by the Scottish Government back in August 2020.
“However, this was based on known facts.
“The First Minister’s failure to consult or provide information to Aberdeen City Council on why her approach to Aberdeen was different from Glasgow is unacceptable.
“We believe the First Minister should have adopted a regional approach to deal with the outbreak in Glasgow, which would have minimised the impact on Aberdeen, but she chose to adopt a position which appears to have been based on political motives rather than clinical evidence and now the whole of Scotland is paying the price.”
Responding to the concerns at today’s briefing, Sturgeon called suggestions Aberdeen was treated unfairly “patent nonsense”.
READ MORE: Coronavirus in Scotland: 806 new Covid cases recorded over 24 hours
Asked for her reaction to the document, the First Minister told viewers: “I’ll do it briefly because I don’t want to get involved in political spats.
“At the heart of the letter from the co-leaders of Aberdeen City Council is the notion that I have deliberately penalised Aberdeen in the restrictions we put on to try to bring the pub-based cluster under control some weeks ago and that we should have done the same for Glasgow.
“In actual fact, as I have stood up here and explained many many times, we took action in both cities we thought were appropriate to the nature of the outbreak.
“I suppose I just have to accept that if for political reasons there are people like the co-leaders of Aberdeen who want to believe that in handling this epidemic I am actually making judgements based on whether I have a view on a particular city over another city then I don’t know. There’s not much I can do about that. It’s nonsense. It’s patent nonsense.”
She added people should concentrate on working together to fight coronavirus instead of “penning frankly ridiculous letters that I think probably say more about the authors of them than they do about me”.
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