Scotland's National Clinical Director Jason Leitch has said that "we are not in prohibition" in response to the decision to close all restaurants and pubs in Glasgow and across central Scotland for 16 days.
He made the comments in an interview this morning with Radio Clyde, a day after Scotland recorded its highest ever daily figures of coronavirus cases with 1,054 new cases - 410 of which were located in Greater Glasgow and Clyde and 195 in Lanarkshire.
Professor Leitch told the station: "It doesn't take a scientist to work out that alcohol tends to lubricate social events. It lowers your guard, it just makes you slightly less aware of your surroundings and its the same thing we use for drunk driving - you just can't pay as much attention as you would without alcohol.
"It's unfortunate as it's not 'alcohol bad, no alcohol good', we are not in prohibiton. But we just want for a little while just to get those numbers down, get everybody just to take a breath and get us into a position where the numbers are low enough that we can start to reopen again."
His comments come as UKHospitality executive director for Scotland Willie Macleod warned that many businesses won't survive the new restrictions on hospitality and licensed trade - saying that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost.
He told BBC Breakfast: "The hospitality, the licensed trade fully appreciates the health position and we realise the Government has very difficult decisions to make to balance public health and the economy but the impact on businesses that have worked very hard and successfully to provide safe hygienic environments for customers and staff, the impact is going to be horrific.
"It's coming at a very difficult time of year. There's never an easy time of year, but we're reliant on tourism as well as local customers, we're just going into the mid term holiday period and customers in Scotland and elsewhere are absolutely uncertain now about whether to continue with their holiday bookings.
"Closing bars and restaurants is going to have a massive impact on businesses that are really just climbing back from a prolonged period of lockdown, they've reopened with reduced capacity to cope with social distancing, they were then hit by the 10pm curfew and with reduced demand and reduced consumer confidence business resilience is as low as it can be.
"Many businesses won't survive and I'm afraid we're going to see tens of thousands of job losses by the time we do the final count on all of this."
