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During her daily coronavirus press conference, Scotland’s First Minister highlighted imported cases of the deadly coronavirus as one of the biggest risks facing the country. Nicola Sturgeon pointed to the situation in Melbourne, Australia where a 6-week lockdown has been imposed when previously the region had virtually no cases. 

Ms Sturgeon said: “As we look ahead now we must be aware that one of our biggest risk factors, as we suppress the virus here, is the importation of new cases to Scotland that then have the potential to spread.

“That risk is illustrated very well I think by the situation in Australia just now.

“Melbourne its second-biggest city has gone from virtual elimination of the virus to a new six-week lockdown in a very short space of time.

“While there are still investigations of that underway there are indications that this may well have been from cases coming into the country.

“It is also the case that one of the criteria that we must satisfy ourselves of before our move to phase 3 and one of the criteria set out by the World Health Organisation is the need to ‘managing the risk of export and importing cases from communities with a high risk of transmission’.

“This is an issue that becomes more and more important as fewer and fewer people in Scotland have the virus.”

More to follow…

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