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The Scottish Government has, on a daily basis, been monitoring the number of settings/schools/hubs that are open for children and young people of keyworkers and/or vulnerable, and how many children and young people have been attending these since schools closed.

Research and survey activity is also being undertaken by a range of external stakeholders (such as academic institutions, private and voluntary organisations, etc.) which cover the UK as a whole, but some which only focusses on Scotland. These studies gather evidence directly from children and young people, in light of the current covid-19 situation, with regards to their thoughts, feelings and experiences during this period (including the impact of school closures and home schooling), and contributes to the evidence base on which the Scottish Government draws to inform and monitor the impact the current situation is having on the lives of children and young people.

The Scottish Government has, on a daily basis, been monitoring the number of settings/schools/hubs that are open for children and young people of keyworkers and/or vulnerable, and how many children and young people have been attending these since schools closed.

Research and survey activity is also being undertaken by a range of external stakeholders (such as academic institutions, private and voluntary organisations, etc.) which cover the UK as a whole, but some which only focusses on Scotland. These studies gather evidence directly from children and young people, in light of the current covid-19 situation, with regards to their thoughts, feelings and experiences during this period (including the impact of school closures and home schooling), and contributes to the evidence base on which the Scottish Government draws to inform and monitor the impact the current situation is having on the lives of children and young people.

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/

It is not possible for Public Health Scotland to specifically identify people with a severe learning disability who have been issued with a shielding letter.

Care home residents and staff are priorities for testing. Testing is taking place in care homes, in accordance with our current priority to direct testing to save lives and protect the vulnerable.

There has been a steady expansion of testing for care home residents and workers.

Testing clearly does not provide a comprehensive response to the COVID threat, but it is an important tool to help guide clinical response, assess prevalence, transmission and the impact of infection prevention and control in these settings.

Patients and residents in care settings are likely to be more vulnerable due to co-morbid conditions or other risk factors. We have already implemented testing policies to address some of those risks:

Testing over 70s on admission to hospital;

• Discharges to care homes subject to 2 negative tests before admission and other admissions to care homes to be tested before or on admission; and
• Enhanced outbreak investigation approach to care homes (all residents tested where there is one infected resident)

We are now moving to test all care home workers on a weekly basis. I announced on 18 May that regular testing will be carried out of staff in care homes, subject to their agreement, which will include testing staff who are not symptomatic.

NHS Boards have put in place local pathways with Health and Social Care Partnerships to enable social care staff to access testing. This includes clear lines for the independent and third sector workforce in care homes and care at home settings.

There will be read across to the new Test and Protect activity which will seek to maintain low levels of community transmission and will cover everyone who displays COVID-like symptoms.

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.