Ten new cases of Covid-19 detected in NHS Highland area
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Ten more people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the NHS Highland area – amid warnings from the First Minister that the UK and Scotland are at a "critical point" in the pandemic.
The cumulative number of cases across the Highlands since the start of this year's outbreak rose to 535 when the latest daily update was published today.
In Scotland as a whole, 203 new cases of Covid-19 were detected in the past 24 hours.
That figure is down from Thursday's update of 290, but represented a higher proportion of those people tested - up to 4.4 per cent from 4.0 per cent yesterday.
The number of people in hospital with recently-confirmed coronavirus rose nine to 61. Of those, five were in intensive care last night – a figure which was unchanged from Thursday. But sadly one further person who has tested positive has now died.
And Nicola Sturgeon has warned that this weekend will be important as to what decisions are taken to further limit the recent spread of the virus.
Her comments came as the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) also warned that the R number across the British Isles is now somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4, and that the number of new Covid-19 infections is growing by somewhere between two per cent and seven per cent each day.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the north of Scotland, there were no reports overnight of fresh cases of the coronavirus in NHS Shetland, NHS Orkney or NHS Eileanan Siar. Their figures all remained unchanged on Friday.
NHS Grampian recorded 10 further cases, taking its cumulative total to 2065. And NHS Tayside's overall tally rose 14 to 2247.
There have now been 23,776 confirmed cases of Covid-19 detected in Scotland since the beginning of the pandemic.
