Yesterday (January 5) First Minister Nicola Sturgeon spoke at the Scottish Parliament and announced that as of today, self-isolation rules in Scotland would be changing.
She said that whilst the initial advice when someone tests positive for covid will still be to self-isolate for 10 days, there will now be an option to end isolation after seven days as long as you meet the criteria.
This means that in order to carry out seven days rather than 10, you can't have a fever and you must record two negative lateral flow tests - one no earlier than day six after testing positive and another at least 24 hours later.
She added: "The second change applies to close contacts of positive cases - including household contacts - who are either under the age of 18 years, 4 months, or who are older than that and fully vaccinated.
"By fully vaccinated, we mean first, second and booster or third doses
"For close contacts in these categories the requirement to self-isolate will end and be replaced by a requirement to take a lateral flow test every day for seven days. Obviously, if one of these tests is positive, self- isolation will then be required.
"Anyone identified as a close contact who is over 18 years and four months and not fully vaccinated will still be asked to self-isolate for 10 days and take a PCR test."
Speaking after her announcement, Professor James Chalmers, a respiratory research expert at the University of Dundee’s School of Medicine, warned the public they have to be "scrupulously honest" about their lateral flow tests results and that anybody who "cheats these rules" by leaving quarantine without testing negative could put others at risk as there is a chance they may still be infectious.
The news comes less than a day after the UK Government announced that they would be scrapping all pre-departure tests for UK travellers.
And although the Scottish Government have not yet followed suit, they are expected to within the coming days.
Professor Chalmers, who is also a consultant respiratory physician, told BBC Good Morning Scotland: "This isn't that the self-isolation period has been cut from 10 to seven days, it’s still 10 days unless you are able to post two negative lateral flow tests.
"If you don’t take a lateral flow test, if you just exit self-isolation at day seven, the modelling suggests a 15% risk that you are still infections, so anybody who cheats these rules is putting others at risk because there is still a risk if you don’t have those negative lateral flow tests.
"We know that the LFTs are extremely specific – that means if you’ve got a positive lateral flow, particularly at the moment when there’s a lot of covid about.
"The chance of a false positive is something like three in 10,000 so it’s not going to be a false positive."
Professor Chalmers said that, despite the high number of cases in Scotland, with 16,103 new coronavirus infections announced on Wednesday, the peak is not expected until later this month.
He explained: "We can expect this month to see a peak in the number of cases, and the number of hospitalisations to peak around the same time as they did last year, which is towards the end of January.
"So, although it feels like there is a huge number of cases in Scotland at the moment and hospitalisations have doubled in the course of the week, we’re still at a relatively early stage of this and we’ve got probably a week to 10 days of case growth and then a couple of weeks of increases in hospitalisations still to get through."
