CARE home deaths have fallen by 69% in the past four weeks, the First Minister announced at her daily coronavirus briefing yesterday.

They accounted for just under 12% of the weekly death toll this week, which, with one week’s exception, was “the lowest proportion recorded in any week since the very start of the pandemic”.

Sturgeon also announced guidance on the long-awaited care home visits, which are due to start in early March. She said: “All care homes that can, should support residents to have up to two designated visitors each.

“That might not sound like much and we obviously hope to get back to more normality in the weeks to come but I know for many across the country, even that is a big step back to a more normal way of life.”

She thanked the “exceptionally high” vaccine uptake in care homes and everyone in the care sector for making this possible.

To show thanks, more than 150,000 NHS staff are being awarded an interim 1% pay rise, with Health Secretary Jeane Freeman saying it comes amid the “sustained pressure” they have been under during the pandemic.

Freeman said while formal pay negotiations had been impacted by the delay to the UK Budget, the Scottish Government will give staff an interim 1% “payment on account” – which will be backdated to December last year.

Later on in the briefing, Sturgeon acknowledged the reaction to the roadmap out of lockdown she announced the day before. She spoke about the frustrations everyone was feeling, but explained she had to be cautious because nobody knows how the new, more infectious variants are going to behave once the restrictions are lifted.

“My hope is that the more we learn about the impact of the early changes, the more confidence we will then have that we can go further and faster, without risking a resurgence of the virus that would set us all back. If we become confident over the next few weeks that we can do more, then we will do more,” she said.

She also said she hoped all parts of Scotland would move to lower levels of restrictions “fairly quickly” over May and June.

On why she didn’t put a date for getting out of lockdown, she explained: “It would certainly make my life a lot easier to do that, or at least in the short term.

“If I was to give you a fixed hard and fast date now, I would pretty much be making it up. I don’t think that is the approach I should take with you.”

Meanwhile, 798 cases were reported yesterday, with a positivity rate of 3.9%, while there were 1018 people in hospital. This was 58 fewer than the previous day, and 93 people were in intensive care.

There were 47 deaths registered in the previous 24 hours of people who contracted the virus in the previous 28 days, which brings the death toll under this measure to 7053. As of yesterday morning, 1,488,077 people had received a first dose of the vaccine, and yesterday 6918 received their second.