BORIS Johnson’s decision to relax the stay-at-home message in England ahead of Scotland risks the importation of the coronavirus, one of the UK’s leading public health experts has warned.

Professor Linda Bauld told the Sunday National that while it was hoped the vaccines would continue to be effective and case numbers and hospital admission rates would decline all over the UK, no-one could predict the result of the divergence in policies.

The Scottish Government is not expected to lift the legal requirement to stay at home except for essential purposes until after April 5, but Professor Bauld said it was clear from the English plan that people would be able to travel from March 29 in time for Easter at the beginning of April.

“If people come up to Scotland after that date and there are high levels of infection still in England then of course there is risk of importation of the virus,” said Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh “We saw from the genomic studies after the summer that the new viruses that ended up in Scotland were coming from people who were not just travelling internationally but were also from people travelling from other parts of the UK.

“What we can do about it is actually very difficult because we are part of the UK and it is incredibly difficult to prevent people travelling between England and Scotland – in fact even now there are many exceptions to the stay-at-home rule so we have people travelling over that border all the time.”

Bauld said there were several reasons to continue to be cautious with the main one being that in order to achieve herd immunity between 75-80% of the population would have to be vaccinated.

She warned that while the uptake in the older generations was “fantastic”, she didn’t think it would be mirrored to the same extent by younger people.

“I think getting that level of coverage once we roll out the vaccine to younger adults is going to be very challenging,” she said. “Once you get to people in their 20s and 30s the motivation for them to get vaccinated is far lower so we need mass media campaigns around that to make sure people realise they need to do it for the benefit of others.”

The Edinburgh University professor also pointed out that the vaccines are not 100% effective.

“We are still going to have people who have been vaccinated who are still going to become unwell – hopefully in small numbers but the risk is not removed so we really need to be very cautious and maintain some of the public health measures to see how we go,” she said.

ALTHOUGH she said planning for Easter would be a “mistake”, Bauld was optimistic the situation would be “very good” in the summer allowing people to holiday in Scotland.

“There is a seasonality to this which we saw last year and we now have the vaccines and people will be outside more. I don’t think there is anything wrong with people thinking ahead to what they might be doing in July and I completely accept and support the need for the hospitality industry in Scotland to get back on its feet,” she said.

“In three weeks when the Scottish Government release their more detailed plan we will probably have an indication of more concrete dates and I think I would be optimistic that in the summer people can travel around the UK.”

Bauld said she was more concerned about how the country would prepare for the coming autumn and next winter.

“There could be more variants depending on what happens with international travel. The UK Government has said possible foreign travel from mid-May so people will be going abroad and the concern is that they will be bringing it back with them.

“We can also grow our own variants if we still have some infection in the community. When the virus is present, particularly when you vaccinate people, there is a risk you have an escaped mutant because the virus wants to be able to infect people who have been vaccinated.”

However she said she hoped any flare-ups could be managed by putting in place an effective testing system so people could be tested repeatedly in their workplaces and older pupils could be tested in schools.

“If we have to impose restrictions I would hope that would be local rather than national,” said Bauld.