Scottish nationalists put a lot of stock in the mystical powers of independence, but this is a new one to Mr S: independence would apparently have improved Scotland’s response to Covid-19.
At least according to Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University and member of the Scottish government’s Covid-19 advisory group. Interviewed on Holyrood magazine’s podcast, she was asked whether a separate Scotland would have made different decisions on the pandemic. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she reportedly replied.
According to Holyrood, the academic added that ‘we could have hopefully been more like a Norway or a Denmark’ and said ‘if you look at the charts and the devolved nations, Scotland does come out in terms of lowest case numbers’. While acknowledging how high Scotland’s case numbers were at the outset of the pandemic, she pointed out that ‘in the summer, we got the numbers low’.
The magazine quotes her as saying:
‘So, yeah, I think it is really hard because we’re not getting the support that we require to be able to go the full way we want to go.
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