Nicola Sturgeon enacted Scotland’s first local lockdown on Wednesday, after announcing Aberdeen would face a tightening of restrictions. This comes after a coronavirus spike linked to bars in the city centre, as cases from a coronavirus cluster rose to 54. However, the BBC’s Nick Robinson questioned the double standards of Scotland’s Government, after Nicola Sturgeon and one of her top health advisers criticised Boris Johnson’s for his own local lockdown measures in the past.
Robinson challenged Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health, from University of Edinburgh, who has been a top coronavirus adviser to the Scottish Government during the pandemic.
The BBC host brought up past remarks she made attacking Boris Johnson’s lockdown orders.
He said: “You were critical of what you called Boris Johnson’s whack-a-mole approach to lockdown because you said it would slowly strangle the economy.
“Isn’t that precisely what Nicola Sturgeon is doing now though?”
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He added: “She is taking a particular city and imposing new lockdown measures.
“That is exactly what Boris Johnson meant in his own approach.”
Professor Sridhar said that the approaches were different because it “depends on what the aim is”.
She criticised the handling of coronavirus in England, because “unlike Scotland, community transmission is still high across the board”.
The University of Edinburgh professor added: “In Scotland, the aim is to end community transmission and we have had extremely low cases.
The health expert added: “I think what this points to is the hard choices. You can’t have it all.
“There is a lot of drunken behaviour outside of pubs on nights out so there needs to be more guidance around that.
“Other countries have put in place curfews to deal with this because you don’t want to have a whole local lockdown that has an impact on local businesses.”
As part of the Aberdeen measures, pubs, cafes and restaurants have been ordered to shut by 5pm and people are banned from travelling in and out of the city in the north east.
