Seòmar agus comataidhean

As announced on 8 April 2020, we have introduced a £5 million package of emergency financial support to help students facing hardship as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. This £5 million includes an additional £2.2 million for Scotland’s Higher Education (HE) Discretionary Funds specifically to address COVID-19 related hardships, which has been made available to colleges and universities immediately. Also as part of that package of £5 million support, the Scottish Funding Council are making £2 million available to support further education (FE) students at college.

The HE Discretionary Funds made available to universities and colleges can be used to support students over summer, up to the end of July, in recognition of reduced employment options.

The Coronavirus (Scotland) (No.2) Act 2020 which makes provisions in relation to tenancies for students in halls of residence and Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) has come into force There is a 7 day notice period for those who have already entered into a student residential tenancy agreement and have occupied the property; and a 28 day notice period for those who have already entered into a student residential tenancy but have not yet occupied the property and agreements entered into while the Act is in force. Students would only be able to use notice periods for Covid-19 specific reasons.

We remain committed to ensuring students are supported during this challenging time and we are actively considering issues relating to the support available for the coming academic year as well as for over the summer months.

Under current regulations, moving house, where reasonably necessary, is considered a reasonable excuse for travel. In those cases, our guidance is then to stay at that home as much as possible.

We hope that in Phase 2 we will be able to relax rules to allow people to meet with another household indoors, whilst observing physical distancing and hygiene measures to contain the spread of the virus. This would include households of more than one person and would be in small numbers.

Until then, there remains a risk of the virus rapidly spreading and overwhelming our NHS if physical distancing is not observed. For that reason, the advice remains where possible to stay at home and to maintain a 2 metre distance when meeting members of another household outdoors. We will continue to monitor the situation and will advise when it is safe to relax restrictions further.

The Routemap and associated COVID-19 guidance can be found at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-framework-decision-making-scotlands-route-map-through-out-crisis/

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have been involved in the design and development of digital tools for contact tracing in Scotland since the project began. The pilot boards of NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Highland & NHS Fife provided initial feedback on the system following their onboarding to the system on 18 May. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have been supportive of the approach undertaken and were onboarded themselves on 21 May. The wider roll out was staggered to ensure that each NHS Board received the necessary level of technical support and all boards completed their onboarding by the end of May in time for Test and Protect to go live.

The National Records of Scotland (NRS) provide a weekly report on death statistics where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, either as the underlying cause of death or as a contributory cause.

As at Sunday 17 May, a total of 3,546 deaths were registered in Scotland where the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was mentioned on the death certificate.

A breakdown of deaths by week can be found on the NRS website: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/covid19stats . Figure 8 of the spreadsheet available on this page also provides a daily total on both date of death and date of registration.

Please note the NRS data is provisional and subject to change in future weekly publications.

Transport Scotland has not had any direct representations regarding the compatibility of linkspans with the MV Glen Sannox.

However, following the completion of the Brodick terminal in early 2018, a number of representations had been received, a few of which, made comments relating to the linkspan.

In addition, as part of the October 2018 public engagement events for the Ardrossan Harbour Project, a number of representations were received regarding the project proposals, including comments regarding the linkspan. A summary of those engagement events can be found at the following link:-

https://www.north-ayrshire.gov.uk/Documents/EconomyCommunities/ardrossan-harbour-engagement-summary.pdf

More recently in October 2019, we have received a number of representations in general about the disruption of the lifeline ferry services during the outages of the linkspans at Gourock and Ardrossan.

Aside from modification to ‘panama leads’, i.e. holes for mooring ropes, no changes have been made to the design of the vessel’s bow.

However, the ‘bulbous bow’ of the vessel, which is under the water during operation, was built and fitted to the vessel by Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (FMEL) prior to launch, but did not meet the strict tolerances of the Classification Society and its rules. A new (within tolerance) bulbous bow is in the shipyard awaiting the dry docking period when it will be fitted to the vessel, replacing the current bulbous bow.

The COVID-19 data and trend charts for Scotland are published daily and provide a range of information, including the number of care homes notifying cases of COVID-19 and the number of suspected cases of COVID-19 in care homes. The data also includes the daily number of people in hospital with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 but does not include details on how many of these are care home staff.

The link to the daily data update is:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/trends-in-number-of-people-in-hospital-with-confirmed-or-suspected-covid-19/

This information is not held by the Scottish Government.

The Glasgow Regional Test Centre, located at Glasgow Airport is one of the five regional testing centres which are now operational in Scotland as part of the UK Testing Programme.

Testing information for Scotland is published daily which reports the total numbers of tests carried out by the Regional Testing Centres in Scotland and the tests carried out by NHS labs. This data is not broken down by individual test centres.

Testing data is not currently broken down by employment groups. Testing for Health and Social Care Workers is primarily carried out through NHS testing at local NHS facilities.

The Scottish Government is co-ordinating and sharing intelligence with UK Government colleagues including, where necessary, to agree on allocation of certain chemical reagents that have a limited global supply. In the case of swabs and other consumables, the Scottish Government is coordinating efforts with NHS Supply Chain and continue to purchase on behalf of NHS Scotland. The Scottish Government is also working with the public and private sector on offers of laboratory facilities and has harnessed the successful approach used to improve PPE supply chain to work on testing supply chain led by the Minister for Trade, Investment and Innovation .