IT’S too soon to start easing out of the lockdown, Nicola Sturgeon has warned.

The First Minister was speaking after one of her scientific advisers said the success of Scotland’s vaccination programme should prompt an “earlier unlocking”.

By 8.30am yesterday, a total of 1,354,966 Scots had received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine – an increase of 34,892 from the previous day.

That included 95% of residents in all care homes and just about all of those over 75.

The programme had also reached 92% of 70-74s, and 69% of 65-69s.

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told a Commons committee that the numbers north of the Border were “looking really good”.

He told MPs: “If you take the view that no Covid death is acceptable or something of that order, you are writing a blank cheque to do any amount of harm by the measures you have implemented to try to control it.

“The data are going really well. The vaccination rollout is, I think, exceeding most people’s expectations. It’s going very well.

“The transmission-blocking potential is key. But so, of course, is its actual ability to protect against death and disease, and to keep people out of hospital and those numbers are looking really good.

“My conclusion from that is: if you’re driven by the data and not by dates right now, you should be looking at earlier unlocking.”

The First Minister, who is due to deliver her revised blueprint for easing Covid restrictions next week, said the virus in the community needed to be lower. 

She said: “I would agree, generally, that the data is going in the right direction so that should give us confidence. I suppose my question would be, earlier than what? Because we haven’t actually set dates, so there’s nothing to sort of gauge that against. 

“We will open up as quickly as we think is safe and sensible, but we will try to guard against doing it so quickly that we actually jeopardise our progress and find ourselves going backwards.”

The First Minister was also asked about the calls from a panel of Scots convened by Holyrood’s Covid-19 Committee to pursue an elimination strategy.

That’s been queried by some public health experts. Dr Christine Tait-Burkard, a research fellow in the department of infection and immunity at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, said it would be “near impossible” for Scotland to pursue. 

“We live in a very multi-cultural society and have very close links to the continent,” she said.

“It’s a bit different from Australia and New Zealand where these strategies are indeed quite feasible because the only ports are by air or by boat.”

Sturgeon said that just because it was harder to do, it didn’t mean it was impossible. 

“We showed last summer we can drive it down to very low levels, which is what I mean by an elimination strategy, get this as low as possible, and then keep it there,” she said.

“Keeping it there brings different challenges for a country like Scotland because of the travel issues than poses for countries like New Zealand. That’s just a fact of life.

“But does that mean it’s wrong to try to do it? No, because we know that the lower the virus is, the less chance of mutating, the less chance of outbreaks of it quickly seeding greater transmission that then has it running out of control again. 

“And actually, the lower you have the overall level of the virus in the community, the more normality you can bring back to the economy and society and the more sustainable you can make that.”