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Nicola Sturgeon attacked the small minority of Scots who do not answer their phones when they are contacted by Test and Protect.
The Prime Minister insisted that the system works well despite new figures showing that 400 people who tested positive for Covid last week could not be contacted.
That meant Public Health Scotland couldn’t record details of where they had been and who they had met in the past few days.
It comes as the Scottish government was forced yesterday to admit that there was a “coding error” in the way Test and Protect recorded response times.
In some cases, the system had been performing up to five times worse than previously thought, with contact tracing taking more than 72 hours to complete.
Guidance established by the World Health Foundation says that effective contact tracing schemes should be both people who have tested positive and people who have been very close within 72 hours.
Scottish Labor leader Richard Leonard said today that the system failed to meet that benchmark in eight weeks out of the previous three months.
He claimed that Test and Protect was “desperately short of resources” after hundreds of Scots who tested positive in the past week were not contacted by trackers.
At Holyrood, Leonard said: “It is worrying that the system is struggling so hard. While the Prime Minister was standing in parliament, saying that the system was working well in recent weeks, a third of contacts were not traced in 72 hours. “.
“So once again there is a disconnect between the Prime Minister’s parliamentary pronouncements and what is happening in the real world.
“It is not just contact tracing that is taking too long. The most recent report from Public Health Scotland shows that there have been 3,500 people who tested positive but were not interviewed by Test and Protect – 400 in the last week alone.”
Sturgeon insisted that it was not Test and Protect’s fault if more than 3,000 Scots could not be reached.
“The people in the camera may not like reality, but that’s what the number is about,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean that Test and Protect doesn’t try to contact people. That is, they don’t contact people because the contacts haven’t responded.”
She added: “It is not at all the case that these people have not been contacted because Test and Protect did not have the resources.
“This is a minority of people who have not responded to calls from Test and Protect.
“That is the reality of what these numbers mean. The vast majority of people are complying and responding magnificently when called.”
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