Nicola Sturgeon has outlined measures to head off an incoming wave of Covid infections as a result of the highly-contagious Omicron variant.
As well as new guidelines for supermarkets and household mixing, businesses have been advised to roll back the clock to the eralier days of the pandemic.
The idea is to prevent people directly interacting face-to-face, and to limit the amount of people gathering in one place.
What is new current advice?
Scots have been urged to limit socialising to a maximum of three households at a time.
However, this measure is only advised and therefore not required by law.
This would mean an end to large gatherings of friends, or events such as Christmas parties — with Government advice already in place to cancel these.
What will this mean for pubs and restaurants?
It is likely pubs and other vienues will have to adopt measures designed to keep people apart. These could include limits on the numbers of people allowed in at one time, mandatory distancing between tables — likely to be two metres — and strict enforcement of track and trace procedures.
Mask-wearing will also be encouraged when moving between tables and staff will have to be protected appropriately.
The First Minister said: "For hospitality, it will mean, for example, measures to avoid crowding at bars and between tables, and a reminder of the requirement to collect contact details of customers to help with contact tracing."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here