In August sympathetic pundits and academics smugly touted Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘Zero Covid’ strategy, boasting Scotland would follow New Zealand in eradicating the disease. Sturgeon herself even played politics by threatening the imposition of a travel border to protect Scotland’s ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. Now it looks like that argument could be made the other way around…

Scotland is currently suffering the worst Covid resurgence of any country in the UK and it’s not getting better. The Herald is reporting that Scotland now appears to have the highest coronavirus R number and shortest doubling time of any UK nation. The hubris and nationalistic rhetoric from Sturgeon over the summer should now be coming back to bite her. Will the traditionally supine media challenge the SNP for once on this?