Pandemic is ‘accelerating’ in Scotland

More than 700 new cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in Scotland in the last 24 hours.

Scotland’s National Clinical Director Jason Leitch said the pandemic was now “accelerating” in Scotland.

The daily total of 714 is the highest number of cases confirmed in a day since mass testing began, and 156 more than Friday’s figure.

The Scottish government said 11.5% of those newly tested in the past 24 hours had been positive for Covid-19.

The number of people in hospital with recently confirmed Covid-19 has also risen by 10 to 99.

There were no further deaths reported in the past 24 hours, but one death was confirmed from the previous day, bringing the total to 2,511.

Mr Leitch said the trend in Scotland would now be for rises of “300 to 400 to 600” in the number of cases, rather than smaller increases.

“Our pandemic in Scotland is presently accelerating – and we need to manage it,” he told the BBC.

Almost 3,500 new cases have been confirmed in Scotland over the past seven days.

The current focus of Scotland’s outbreak appears to be in Glasgow, which recorded a weekly case rate of 162.5 per 100,000 people on Thursday.

The rate is more than twice that of North Lanarkshire, which has the second highest rate among local authorities. It is also the highest seen in Scotland since the start of the outbreak in March.

The number of tests being carried out is far higher than at the peak of Scotland’s outbreak in April – meaning more positive cases will be detected – but the percentage of positive tests is also rising.

Mr Leitch said restrictions on households mixing indoors, which were extended across the whole of Scotland on Tuesday, would take a while to have an affect.

“It’s two, three weeks before you show any difference,” he said.

“And we’ve now had universities and colleges back and you can see we now have hundreds of cases inside those institutions.”

Public health teams in Scotland are currently dealing with a number of large outbreaks among students living in shared accommodation.

More than 170 students have tested positive in halls of residence at the University of Glasgow and there have been other outbreaks in Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, NHS Fife has confirmed seven workers from Kettle Produce in Balmalcolm in Fife, have tested positive for Covid-19.

It said all confirmed cases had mild symptoms and were currently isolating at home.