How Nicola Sturgeon has secretly massaged Scotland’s coronavirus record

Nicola Sturgeon spent much of July telling anyone who would listen that the prevalence of coronavirus in England was “five times” higher than in Scotland. The figure was deployed to justify her refusal to rule out effectively closing the border by imposing quarantine on travellers from England, and her highly controversial move to set her a Scotland-only policy on air bridges, which airports warned put livelihoods at risk. The day after she first made the claim, masked nationalists in hazmat suits descended on the border near Berwick-upon-Tweed, shouting abuse at English “plague carriers”. Alongside their saltires and SNP flags (the First Minister refused to confirm whether her party took any disciplinary action against participants) the wording on their banner was instructive: ‘Keep Scotland Covid Free’. Sturgeon’s “five times” claim later turned out to be as dodgy as the one painted by protesters onto a bedsheet. In a rare intervention, the UK statistics watchdog rebuked the Scottish Government for its use of misleading figures, saying the “un-caveated” comparison should never have been made. How did Sturgeon respond? An mea culpa at Holyrood, where she managed to make the claim three times in just one day, for misleading MSPs? A P45 for the official or, more likely, the SNP spad who provided the First Minister with unsound data? Instead, she accused opposition politicians who dared challenge her on the episode of politicising the crisis. That day, she was named the world’s fifth most eloquent “world leader” alongside the likes of Jacinda Ahern of New Zealand and Germany’s Angela Merkel. Judges praised her for her straight talking. Scottish unionists didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. And of course, Scotland has not been “Covid free” since February. Early on, Ms Sturgeon took the decision to keep a major outbreak at a conference in Edinburgh from the Scottish public. A kiltmaker who dressed delegates and a guide who took them on a walking tour across the city questioned why they were never spoken to by contact tracers and wondered whether they had unwittingly played a role in spreading the virus across the Scottish capital. According to recently-published figures from the Office for National Statistics, Scotland had the third-highest rate of excess deaths in Europe by the end of May, behind only England and Spain. A write-up of the story in The National, a pro-independence daily newspaper dubbed by some as 'McPravda', informed readers that England had the worst excess deaths in Europe.

source https://news.yahoo.com/nicola-sturgeon-secretly-massaged-scotland-104811318.html