Dr Philippa Whitford hits back at BBC claim about Scotland's Covid response

Dr Philippa Whitford was brought onto the BBC News channel to discuss the pandemic following Matt Hancock's press conference about the coronavirus.

Host Clive Myrie talked about how the Scottish people think First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has handled the pandemic "pretty well".

However, he then moved onto say "there is consensus" that the handling of the situation in Scottish care homes was a "disaster" and that Scotland has one of the highest care home death rates per capita "anywhere in Europe".

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Dr Whitford quickly rebutted the BBC host's claims, saying: "Well I would just have to start with your care home deaths per capita. In actual fact, the England & Wales data from ONS [Office for National Statisitics] and the data from Scotland is almost exactly the same because you have to use excess deaths in the first wave, simply because people weren't being tested."

She added that a recent Nuffield Trust report and the London School of Economics both refuted the claims of Scotland's care home deaths.

Whitford continued: "There was about 11,000 care home deaths in England which were not put down to Covid, but clearly were. So when you look at excess deaths, it's about 45 per 100,000 in England, Wales and Scotland.

"We didn't do better, but we didn't do worse. This narrative that somehow Scotland did particularly badly - they didn't."

Dr Whitford said that at the beginning of the pandemic, the testing for Covid-19 was not where it is today and that the failure was "not looking at the ability of care homes" to isolate residents who had caught the virus.

UK Health Secretary Hancock highlighted in his conference that the so-called Indian variant is becoming the predominant strain in the UK.

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In light of this, Myrie asked Dr Whitford about the June 21 date for full unlocking of Covid restrictions.

She highlighted that scientific groups like Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) say the Indian variant is about 50% more infectious than the Kent variant, which was already 50-70% more infectious than the original virus.

This significant increase means that measures we adapted to in the first lockdown last year "may not be strict enough", according to Dr Whitford.

She added that with coronavirus cases rising in areas across the UK, it would be "foolhardy to tie yourself to the mast of the 21st of June when the Government's failure to control borders let it in and we're in danger of actually just letting a whole third wave occur".

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She finished by criticising the UK Government's focus on opening back up and sluggishness on combatting rising variants of the virus.

Dr Whitford said: "I would have thought 15 months into this pandemic we would have learnt by now that you can't just pluck a date out of the air, pin it up on a board and somehow stick to it.

" We had 'it'll be over in 12 weeks', we'll be hugging by November', 'we'll have a normal Christmas'. You can't do that and even in the Government's four key measures, one of them is whether a variant derails things. 

"It was a complete failure not to have India on the red list when Bangladesh and Pakistan were added. It allowed it in and now it is doing exactly what more infectious variants do - spreading in communities.

"To suddenly end all social distancing in the middle of rising cases to me seems foolhardy."