A YEAR ago now we were on holiday with friends in Thailand as the warning signs about Covid-19 were beginning to emerge in Europe. In January, Thailand itself had registered the first case of the virus outside of China.

There was no sense of alarm but a great deal of sensible precaution. Mask-wearing was mandatory. In hotels and shopping malls, temperature screening was routinely applied on entry. The Thais do not go in for contact greetings anyway, but that was definitely out.

Thailand had relatively recent experience of pandemics, having got avian influenza wrong in 2009 and learned the lessons which were available for the world to apply. The main one was an echo of the World Health Organisation’s key advice: “Test, test, test”. Soon, 250 testing stations were set up throughout the country.

As we flew home from Bangkok airport, our temperatures were checked one last time. In retrospect, of course, we would have been much safer staying since Thailand has had fewer than 24,000 cases and 80 deaths in a population of 70 million.

To the end of January, according to National Records of Scotland, we have 8347 deaths here, arising from 187,000 identified cases. These figures represent an appalling failure of public policy and why anyone should pretend otherwise is beyond me. The question now is whether lessons will be learned or overtaken by laps of honour.

There are cultural differences with Thailand and other countries which have performed heroically to limit the impact of the epidemic. However, not all of the vast statistical discrepancies can be explained away so glibly. The slowness in applying lessons from countries which were succeeding remains astonishing.

Back then, we flew back into Glasgow without the remotest suggestion that it was anything other than business as usual. A year later, the idea of testing at airports is still being discussed. It took months of stupid debate before it was decided, on balance, that wearing masks was probably a good idea. The restrictions on incoming travel have been belated and incoherent.

Most of this can, of course, be applied to the UK as a whole and the same questions will have to answered in Edinburgh and Whitehall. For health policy purposes, however, Scottish decision-making is fully devolved and there was never a better opportunity to do things differently – not in competition but collaboratively to find what works best. Fat chance of that.

I have never understood why the test, test, test mantra was abandoned so early and so easily. Equally, the low-cost, simple option of temperature screening was dismissed out of hand because it does not, of itself, provide a reliable guide to whether or not a person has Covid-19.

Is that obvious reality not outweighed by the fact that a high temperature is a guide to something being amiss, which may or may not turn out to be Covid-19? As a screening process, rather than the source of reliable diagnosis, that seems cheap and sensible. At least the Thais and half the world think so.

Apart from a few restaurants operating to high standards (and closed for their trouble), the only times I have had my temperature taken in the past year was to attend football matches, here and in Europe. Football has probably done more to identify cases than any other sector. Are its ruling bodies also hopelessly wrong to insist on temperature screening as part of that process?

By the time we landed at Stornoway airport last February, a fairly obvious thought had occurred. Should it not be possible to test everyone coming onto the island and thereby insulate it pretty securely from what is threatening elsewhere in the country? Test, track and trace is not such a formidable challenge when it involves tens of thousands rather than millions of people, with a trickle of incoming traffic.

To this day, no such regime has been established in Scotland’s islands. The entire policy has been based on pan-Scottish uniformity with minimal local decision-making or recognition of vastly different characteristics within our geography and demography. That would not fit the prevailing orthodoxy.

Just about everywhere else in Europe, probably the world, the potential for doing things differently on islands – to achieve a more forensic, localised balance between fragile economies, schooling and public health – has been recognised. Last week, the Isle of Man, for example, was able to lift all internal restrictions, having maintained its own ‘bubble”.

The Faroe islands offer another interesting case study, using their devolved powers from Denmark. Hit by a small surge of cases last summer, they went for mass testing – which, of course, revealed non-symptomatic cases that could then be addressed. To date, there have been a quarter of a million tests – more than four for each resident – and one death. Could we have learned nothing for our own islands or indeed Scotland as a whole?

And if you are still hoping to fit in a summer break, do not despair. The Canary Islands (devolved from Spain) have just re-opened for business – subject to testing before departure and, yes, temperature screening on arrival. But maybe they too have got that wrong.

On a highly positive note, the vaccination programme in the Western isles is leading the rest of Scotland, brilliantly organised and with a third of the population having received their first jab. Sometimes, small is beautiful and local really is best.

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