NICOLA Sturgeon is hopeful the ramped-up vaccine programme will allow pubs and restaurants to re-open with fewer restrictions and mitigations in place as she denied the hospitality sector is being “unfairly treated”.

As part of the Scottish Government’s exit plan from the lockdown, as things stand, hospitality businesses will be able to re-open from April 26. Businesses will be able to open outdoors areas until 10pm with alcohol being served while indoor areas will have an 8pm curfew and no alcohol served.

At her daily coronavirus briefing, the First Minister was asked whether rules such as the 2-metre exemption may have to be removed given the new more transmissible variant of the virus of whether the vaccine rollout will allow rules to be relaxed.

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She said: “Hopefully in time it’s the later.”

Ms Sturgeon said: “The vaccine will provide us with more, maybe not all, but more of the protection that currently restrictions and mitigations are providing us with. That's what we’re trying to get to.

“I hope that we get back to a position later this year, over the summer, where if not every single one of these measures is lifted, then fewer of them will be necessary because the vaccine will be doing more of that work – taking more of that strain.”

The First Minister warned that “it's a tricky thing to get in sync”.

She added: “We don’t yet know all of what we want to know about the impact vaccination has on transmission.

“What we do know so far is positive – I think at the upper end of that optimism scale that we had before the programme started.

“We still need to learn more about just how much the vaccine suppresses transmission before we can take these decisions in any definitive way.”

Ms Sturgeon insisted that she has “overwhelming sympathy” for the hospitality industry, which she said has been “disproportionately hit because of the nature of the services they provide and the way the virus spreads”.

“The evidence and the science is not complicated. Infectious viruses spread when people come together.

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“They spread more in places where people are more likely to be close together, not be two metres physically distanced – in places where there is perhaps poorer ventilation and in places where people’s inhibitions are perhaps lowered, which happens when people drink alcohol.

“That is why hospitality is not the only place that this virus will spread – it will spread wherever people come together. Generally speaking, these are environments where the risk is greater.”

The First Minister stressed that her intention is to “get hospitality back to normal” as quickly as possible – claiming her strategy goes further than Boris Johnson’s plan.

She said: “At the moment under England’s routemap, there’s no indoor hospitality until the middle of May. “That would take us a little bit ahead of the position in England.”