Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

In March last year, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she wanted to "eliminate" Covid from Scotland, but the consensus among most disease experts was that this would be very difficult.

The situation, at a local and international level, has moved on significantly since then.

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, says the virus is here to stay - and it took many governments far too long to realise it couldn't be eliminated.

"This was obvious [to epidemiologists] from February 2020. We knew way back then this virus was going to become endemic," he told BBC Scotland.

"But when you're at the endemic level, the thing that influences how many cases you're seeing is primarily how quickly people lose immunity."

Introducing social controls at this point can have a short-term impact on infection levels, but then they just "drift" back up again and could actually make things worse by lengthening the gap between infections, he adds.

"Immunity to infection and even to severe disease doesn't last forever.

"It's quite plausible that if you get exposed every six months you get a mild infection. If you only get exposed every five years you end up getting really sick."