The leading Edinburgh University public health specialist Linda Bauld says recent guidance on facemasks in care homes alongside bans on outdoor school sports days are difficult to justify on the basis of the risk of infection that people face.

The Professor of Public Health at the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh was addressing the question of what has been learnt in terms of behavioural change during the covid-19 crisis in the final session of the ALLIANCE Scotland annual conference: Equally Connected: Equally Valued.

She said communication – and particularly the focus on science in science communication – will continue to be particularly important as we face a future where coronaviruses become, she believes, a ‘recurrent seasonal infection’.

ALLIANCE Director of Strategy and Engagement, Irene Oldfather who chaired the session asked, given the position of the ALLIANCE and many others that care homes are people’s homes, what Professor Bauld made of this week’s guidance that people living in residential care homes should wear face masks in communal areas.

“My personal view is that I don’t think that is necessary, certainly not in the medium to longer term,” replied Professor Bauld.

“We are still living with a number of scenarios where there is huge caution and anomalies in the guidance. I always try not to be political, but the fact that parents can’t go and watch a school sports day distanced, or go to a nursery graduation outside, which I know has been in the press – there just seems to be no science behind that of the moment.

“And likewise, I think the face coverings in a care home setting, where the people have been vaccinated and the staff have been vaccinated and everybody is ‘two doses plus ten days’, I think is a very very precautionary approach and not one that can be sustained.”

However, Professor Bauld also said that she echoed the growing number of experts saying that the rate of growth in cases of the delta (Indian) variant of the virus – doubling every four and a half to eleven days – creates a problem:

“At the moment, as the First Minister has said, we have around half the people in hospital that we would expect to have given the level of infection we have. But if there is a doubling of infections – and you can see that exponential rise in some parts of the UK – it does mean that in two to three weeks’ time, we may have double the number of people in hospital that we currently have, perhaps even higher than that.

“So that is why most of us are saying at UK level – things are already moving quite slowly in Scotland – that opening up the night-time economy, for example, while we still have over half the population still receiving a second dose, is premature.”

Professor Bauld said she believed everybody now understands what public health is, in a way that they might not have before the pandemic, and that it is important that public health, health and care systems are all properly resourced so they can be resilient enough to cope with a future pandemic.

In the meantime, she said, given the likelihood that we will have to learn to live with the virus, the routine behavioural changes we have all seen, such as regular handwashing and not meeting in poorly ventilated spaces, are behaviours she believe we should try and maintain.

healthandcare.scot is pleased to be the media partner for the ALLIANCE’s Equally Connected: Equally Valued Conference.

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