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Thank you. I will follow-up Murdo Fraser’s questioning about the expansion of the vaccination passport and what that might mean. I think that we all recognise that we must take measures to restrict Covid spreading. You are obviously against vaccination passports and their expansion. Barry McCulloch, what do you feel should happen? What are your alternative options to that?

I will give Leon Thompson the opportunity to respond, if he has anything to add.

I have a quick question around the timing. We are coming into a period when hospitality gets a fair proportion of their annual income and introducing more stringent controls during this time would have an impact on that. You need time to plan with staff, order supplies and work out rotas and so on. How quickly can you pivot under those circumstances?

Given that you have pushed back, cabinet secretary, you will not be surprised that I am going to push back against you. Peter Donnelly has raised the issue of there being 20 per cent more deaths than expected, which is unexplained. That is concerning. I am looking at statistics that say that the number of patients who are waiting to be seen for eight key diagnostic tests is 30 per cent higher than the 12-month average back in 2019-20. I totally recognise the need for the Government to balance, but I am starting to question whether we are getting that balance right. As Peter Donnelly said, diseases are being underinvestigated and undertreated and the data is not being collected. Is there potential for the Government to start collecting more data on that, because there is a crisis coming down the road at some point?

Dr Buist, we know that we were short of some 860 GPs before the pandemic. We were working towards having multidisciplinary teams and more community care. A lot of that was put on hold because of the pandemic. However, the pandemic resulted in a rapid deployment of technology. As we recover from the crisis, will the continued deployment of technology help doctors with the backlog and the development of future policy?

I thank the witnesses for their answers. It is certainly a concern. I have always thought that the first step should be to look after the health and wellbeing of those who look after us.

Mr Morrison, you described a system that was creaking and not working pre-pandemic, and you are suggesting that it is now down at about half its capacity. Can you catch up while the Covid measures are in place? First and foremost, do we have to accept that, under the current conditions, it will be nigh on impossible to catch back up to where we were pre-pandemic? What needs to happen to return to a balanced operating system? Linked to that, is there an opportunity to reassess and redesign the system on the basis of learning from Covid?

Good morning. I will start with a very general question. I always think that, if we are to have a working healthcare sector, we need to look at the morale and health of the professionals in the sector. What is the situation in that respect compared to what it was pre-pandemic?

What I am hearing in that reply is that you are unable, in the three-week review process, to ascribe an increase in vaccine uptake specifically to the impact of any of the measures. Given that vaccine uptake is one of the most important things in tackling the virus, and given the amount of resource that has been deployed into vaccination passports and the problems with those passports—both practical and in relation to human rights—it is really important that you are able to persuade the population that a vaccination passport scheme is the right way to go, but I am not hearing that, cabinet secretary.

I want to move on but, from a science perspective, we do not know by how much vaccine uptake would have increased without a vaccination passport scheme. That is the issue.

Given that specific groups are less well vaccinated than others—for example, we know that fewer people in the African population are vaccinated—how are those demographic groups being targeted?

I will be brief, because a lot of the points have been covered. Everybody recognises the importance of ventilation, not just for Covid but for many other considerations, as well as the fact that CO2 monitoring would be beneficial. I am thinking about the practicalities of developing a country where the buildings have good ventilation. As the convener said at the start of the discussion, we know that poverty is a major driver of proliferation of the virus. The practicalities of developing all our buildings so that they have good ventilation is beyond the Government’s budget, so I presume that we are talking about a focus on commercial rather than domestic properties.