Covid restrictions are unlikely to return despite a rise in the number of people with the virus a public health expert has said.  

Professor Linda Bauld said there was no need for the "old days of restrictions and panic" with the current variant, though she warned people to be “alert”. 

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that around 1-in-40 people have Covid in Scotland, a rise from the week before.  

The increase was mostly among adults in their 30s and 40s, but there was no evidence vaccines had stopped working.

The latest ONS figures showed an increase from one case in every 50 people in Scotland the previous week. 

The Herald:

They also showed small increases in cases in England and Northern Ireland last week, although the virus continues to be less prevalent there than in Scotland. 

Prof Bauld, a public health expert from the University of Edinburgh, told BBC Radio's Good Moring Scotland programme the message was "be alert but certainly don't panic". 

"There is absolutely no evidence that our vaccines have stopped working. We know that they confer good protection and [with] some parts of our immune response that's a longer-term level of protection," she said. 

"So we're not going back to the old days of restrictions and panic with this variant we have now. But we do need to be aware that we might be heading into another few weeks where it's more common for people to become infected with this virus."