Lockdown mired in obfuscation and errors looks likely to grind on

THIS surreal period of half-life is now limping towards its sixtieth day – a grim milestone.

It’s a gloomy stasis that’s strangling the economy to the extent that it’s hard to compute the probable repercussions.

GDP is likely to slump by about a third – and more than one in four employed people are furloughed.

The costs are stratospheric and the economy is on life support – so when will this national paralysis draw to a close?

On Thursday, we’re told Nicola Sturgeon will announce a route-map out of lockdown, with some ‘easements’, though they’re likely to be cautious.

The relaxation will begin from May 28 – you will be able to sit in a park, have socially distanced meetings with people from outside your household, and take part in some outdoor activities.

That’s fine, as far as it goes – we can’t risk a virus flare-up, undoing the huge gains of recent weeks, with an instant restoration of normality.

But where is the blueprint for an incremental return to something approaching our pre-lockdown existence?

It’s not the job of government, of course, to encourage false hope – though it’s more than capable of making empty promises.

But the contrast with the situation south of the Border couldn’t be starker.

The First Minister, grousing from the sidelines while maintaining she is avowedly apolitical, has relished pouring scorn on Boris Johnson.

The claim is that his reckless unlockdown is marred by poorly worked-out public health messaging that could send transmission rates soaring.

And it’s difficult not to agree that the first phase of the Prime Minister’s plan was muddled and a bit vague.

That said, it was always going to be a messy process, and at least he made a start on drawing a line under this weird spell of purgatorial inertia.

In Scotland, we’re stuck in neutral, with the R number – denoting the rate of viral spread – hanging above us as an ever-present threat.

Yet, writing in the Mail on Sunday, retired consultant Dr John Lee, a former professor of pathology, said the R rate was an ‘artificial construct and not even a number we know with any certainty’.

It’s a ‘mysterious number, calculated in ways that we are not privy to’.

He said: ‘Many analysts suggest that lockdown is directly causing more deaths than the virus.

‘Even worse, it is becoming increasingly clear that assumptions central to the models that generate R are flawed.’

Most strikingly, he highlighted that ‘the NHS is supposed to be there to look after us, not the other way around’.

I spoke to one NHS source who said Hairmyres Hospital in Lanarkshire had an occupancy rate of 44 per cent last week.

While lockdown continues, many are steering clear of hospitals and GP surgeries, putting their own health and indeed lives in jeopardy.

A burgeoning mental health crisis caused by wrecked livelihoods is looming.

Yet the path out of lockdown in Scotland is as elusive as the R number.

Science squabbles aside, the nagging doubt remains that Miss Sturgeon’s strategy has been guided by a desire for differentiation for political ends.

Sure, she’s entitled to set her own pace – we can’t pretend devolution doesn’t exist.

But the problem arises when it becomes clear we’re going on our way – and it’s not working.

Not a single applicant has been hired for the Contact Tracing Team in Scotland, whose work will prove vital in guiding us out of this quagmire, though the government claims 2,000 workers will be ‘ready to be deployed’ on testing and tracing by June 1.

In England, 21,000 contact tracers have been recruited, close to a target of 18,000 by next week.

Coronavirus deaths in Scottish care homes are double the ratio in England.

(Sturgeon: setting her own lockdown pace, but at what cost?)

But SNP spinners responded by tweeting that a London School of Economics study found deaths related to Covid-19 in English care homes are likely to be ‘severely underestimated’.

Yet the English statistics, unlike those in Scotland, include all excess deaths in care homes and residents who died in hospital.

And isn’t it a bit rich of the SNP to accuse the Tories of a lack of transparency?

Look at the Nike scandal: the government kept us in the dark allegedly for reasons of patient confidentiality, though in the past that was no bar to letting us know about norovirus outbreaks.

Nike held a conference at the Hilton Carlton hotel in Edinburgh at the end of February.

Out of the 70 people who attended, 25 later tested positive for the virus – eight of whom live in Scotland.

Contact tracing appears to have varied between scant and non-existent in those early days – and patently hasn’t improved much since.

Two business owners revealed at the weekend that employees came down with coronavirus-like symptoms after coming into contact with delegates from the conference.

They said they were not informed of the outbreak and there was no contact from public health chiefs warning them of the potential threat to their health.

And for all the talk of a distinctly Scottish approach, why didn’t we instigate lockdown, and call off big sporting fixtures, sooner?

It was another week before a ban on mass gatherings was imposed.

And before it was announced on Thursday, March 12, 67,000 people had gathered at Murrayfield the previous Sunday to watch Scotland play France at rugby.

Propaganda wars don’t end in times of calamity, and some of the SNP’s finest minds have been focusing on how coronavirus helps the case for independence.

It’s a shame their efforts aren’t directed towards the here and now rather than crafting imaginary futures with all the credibility of Tolkien novels.

After all, their top team could do with the back-up.

Miss Sturgeon’s personal dedication as she provides daily updates on the virus death toll isn’t in doubt.

But what about her Cabinet – which, even in the days before lockdown, was a lacklustre and amateurish cabal?

As Health Secretary, disaster-prone Jeane Freeman should be at the forefront of the coronavirus campaign but there’s not much sign of a steady hand on the tiller, or even a hand on the tiller.

In fact there’s not much sign of a tiller, as we discovered at a shambolic media briefing on Sunday when most journalists were unable to connect remotely.

Here Miss Freeman tried out the latest PR fightback on the Nike controversy, when she suggested those who tested positive for the virus had failed to disclose sufficiently detailed information about their movements.

And where is John Swinney, the mastermind of home-schooling – which largely isn’t taking place?

His quango Education Scotland finally got round to producing some attempt at meaningful educational material for parents last week.

In the meantime, thousands of kids, many from deprived homes, have permanently logged out of lessons.

As for plans to re-build the post-pandemic economy, how many landmark speeches can you remember on the subject of engineering a recovery?

Me neither – but is it much of a shock that a gaggle of no-hopers have failed to live up to admittedly low expectations just when we needed them most?

In the meantime, our specially customised Scottish lockdown, mired in cover-up, obfuscation, and incompetence, grinds on.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on May 19, 2020.

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