NICOLA Sturgeon has been criticised by the Conservatives for not wearing a face-covering at Prince Philip’s memorial service, just 24 hours before announcing an extension of Scotland’s mask laws.
In a statement to MSPs, the First Minister said the legal requirement to wear face coverings in some indoor settings including shops and trains would remain in place until April 18.
The mask mandate was initially due to be lifted on March 21, before rising case rates forced the SNP leader to push it back until early April. The new delay comes as infections caused by the highly transmissible BA.2 Omicron wave heads towards its peak.
She told MSPs that keeping masks in place was a “proportionate precautionary measure while we pass the peak of this latest wave.”
However, Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross said it was a sign that the First Minister’s Covid strategy was “clearly failing”.
He told MSPs: “Countries across the UK and Europe have already removed restrictions and are living with Covid but today the First Minister has signalled that facemasks will continue for several more weeks.
“Now we believe that anyone who wants to keep wearing a face mask should keep doing so, particularly if that will help vulnerable friends and relatives. But it should be down to individual choice as it is in other parts of the United Kingdom.
“We should leave it up to people and businesses to decide what's best for them based on public health advice. Nicola Sturgeon has to start trusting the people of Scotland.”
The First Minister said she believed Mr Ross was “seriously out of step with the vast majority of people”.
She told MSPs that there was an understanding that face coverings, particularly in public places, such as shops, was about protecting others until “this wave of infection peaks and start to fall.”
”I think that is a sensible thing to do. And I think the vast majority of people agree with that. And while nobody wants to be doing that for longer than necessary I think most people accept that it is a sensible precautionary measure to take,” she said.
The SNP’s Christine Grahame had a pop at Mr Ross, saying he should “remember that we wear face coverings not just for ourselves but mainly to protect the stranger next to us on the bus, in the supermarket, who may be undergoing, for example, cancer treatment and is immune deficient.”
“The wearing of a face covering is about giving other people protection,” Sturgeon agreed.
“And when you're in a supermarket you don't know who might be close by who is more clinically vulnerable to this virus and while infection levels are as high as they are right now, and we hope they will reduce in the days and weeks to come, but while they're as high as they are right now, if wearing a face covering in a supermarket, for example, might be reducing the risk of passing the virus to somebody who if they did get it would become or be at risk of becoming seriously unwell, then I think that's a place most of us are willing to pay at this stage of the pandemic.”
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser then asked why “given everything she’s said,” the First Minister hadn’t worn a face while at the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh in Westminster Abbey on Tuesday morning.
“I abided by the rules in place,” the SNP leader replied. “I wore a face covering on the train to London and the train back from London. I abide by the rules. And I know that’s something that perhaps the Conservatives struggle to understand, but I abide by the rules.”
Mr Fraser later tweeted that it was “simply extraordinary for @NicolaSturgeon to lecture us in the Chamber on wearing face masks to protect others when she did the opposite yesterday.”
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