Scotland has become the first nation in the United Kingdom to give a booster jab to over half of its adult population. But even in the light of this booster progress First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has a stark warning for Scottish people when she advised them to stay at home.
Sturgeon said, "Please reduce your contact with people from households other than your own as much as you possibly can. For now, please stay at home much more than you normally would and as much as is feasible."
"Right now the risk of getting Covid from interactions with others is high and it is rising. So ask yourself before doing anything you might have planned over the coming days, is it as safe as it needs to be and is it vital enough to you to justify that risk.
"I suspect what is most important to most of us over the next couple of weeks is having time with our families at Christmas. Every interaction we have before then increases the risk of us getting Covid and so possibly losing that"
Since the vaccine programme was launched earlier this year a total of 2,250,118 doses have given to people over 18 as of two days ago, December 14.
50.7 per cent of adults in the country have increased protection against the Omicron variant, which first originated in southern Africa at the end of last month.
Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the booster programme was being ramped up across the country in light of the rising cases of the new strain which is believed to be more transmissible.
Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) in the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh.
Jeff J Mitchell
Yesterday Sturgeon said The Prime Minister and Chancellor must not “sleep walk into an emergency” caused by rapidly rising Omicron cases. She demanded the UK Government step up and provide more financial support to businesses.
The First Minister said she had written to Boris Johnson “appealing to him to put the necessary support schemes in place”, adding that “such is the urgency” of the situation she had requested to talk to him directly later on Thursday.
Her comments came as she told the Scottish Parliament she was “profoundly concerned by the scale and the immediacy of the challenge” that the new strain of the virus poses.
Omicron is likely to be the dominant strain of coronavirus in Scotland from tomorrow, she advised – with 5,951 new coronavirus cases reported on Wednesday, of which almost half (45.4%) were said to be likely to be the new variant.