Covid in Scotland: Have Level Four Restrictions Worked?

A review of Scotland’s Covid-19 tier system will be announced later.

Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already confirmed that the 11 council areas subject to the highest level of restrictions will move to lower levels on Friday.

Tighter restrictions were imposed to reduce the number of cases at Covid hotspots in Scotland, but they came at a cost, requiring the closure of hospitality and non-essential stores, among other measures.

Have the restrictions succeeded in reducing Covid-19 rates in the last three weeks?

The Scottish government has referred many times to areas of Scotland showing “stubbornly” high rates of Covid-19, and the level four restrictions were designed to lower these rates.

Some councils at level four, such as Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire, have had a high number of cases per 100,000 for an extended period.

Others, like Stirling, have seen a more recent increase in cases.

Ministers use a number of measures when deciding at what level a local authority should be, including pressure on local hospitals and expected growth in cases, but a key indicator is the weekly number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

On November 20, when the 11 local authorities entered level four, the areas were mostly ordered at their assigned levels.

Looking at the most recent reliable figures, a more complex picture has emerged.

Clackmannanshire, a level three area, is now at the top of the table, followed by Argyll and Bute, who is at level two, although this figure may be primarily due to the outbreak at the base of the Faslane nuclear submarine. .

Stirling and West Dunbartonshire now have lower rates than many tier two and three areas.

This chart uses figures from December 3, as the most recent data often underestimates the number of positive tests.

So how have the rates changed in the level four areas?

There’s an easy headline for this: all 11 local authorities have seen weekly rate decreases per 100,000 residents.

Stirling has seen the biggest drop in cases with a 58% drop in cases, followed by West Lothian with a 40% cut.

Any decrease in infection rates is good news, but it is important to put these decreases in context.

If we take the four local authorities at the top of the chart on November 20, three of them (Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire) were already experiencing sustained declines in case rates.

Glasgow, in particular, saw its cases finally start to decline in early November after staying at high levels for several weeks.

In fact, the city has been under some kind of additional restrictions since September 1, when the ban on visiting interiors was introduced. Pubs and restaurants have also been closed in much of the central belt since October 9.

The positivity rate is the percentage of tests that are positive and is another key measure for the Scottish government.

If you take a seven-day average of the November 20 rate and compare it to December 3, the rates are mostly low across the 11 level four tips.

There has been very little change in East Ayrshire and South Ayrshire.

And in West Lothian, where the total number of cases has dropped significantly, the positivity rate has risen from 5.5% to 8.3%. Potentially, this could be because health authorities are addressing a clear group of cases, so the tests are very specific.

The positivity rate is important because the World Health Organization considers it a key measure when judging the status of a Covid-19 outbreak in a country.

The organization says that if less than 5% of samples from a comprehensive testing system test positive for two weeks, it is an indication that an epidemic is under control.

The average rate for all of Scotland on December 3 was 5.2%, so six of the level four areas were above that.

There are currently 10 local authorities on level three, including Edinburgh and Dundee.

When analyzing the same period, two of them, Clackmannanshire and North Ayrshire, have seen the weekly average of Covid cases increase per 100,000 people.

In Clackmannanshire, infection rates increased by almost 43% between November 20 and December 3, and provisional figures indicate that they may increase further in the coming days.

Across Scotland, cases continue to fall, from 139 weekly cases per 100,000 people on November 20 to 101 on December 3, despite increases in some critical areas.

The use of Scotland’s strict level four restrictions may not be solely responsible for starting to lower rates, but the figures seem to indicate that it has kept rates mostly down.

The question now is whether the measure has done enough to prevent a possible spike in cases after Christmas from spiraling out of control.

Scotland’s national clinical director, Professor Jason Leitch, said public health advisers felt “a lot of risks” looming as more than two million people prepared to move to less severe restrictions on Friday.

“Retail is going to open and we’re a bit worried about that, and the other thing we’re worrying about is Christmas,” he told BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland program.

“Those two things together make us cautious about the rest of the changes that will be possible today … We ask people not to rush, just to be careful.”