As you will be aware, due to concerns about the accelerating transmission of the Omicron variant, both the UK and Scottish Governments have this week confirmed various additional measures.
The Scottish Government has set out guidance and measures, which will come into effect from midnight on Friday – for ease of reference, links to the announcement of these measures and the guidance, are included on the Scottish Government website.
COVID-19 pages of the Scottish Government website.
Given this new guidance, which includes Councils restarting COVID-19 emergency response and community support activities and the additional demands and pressures of the resultant impact of increasing levels of COVID-19 in our communities and across our workforce, the Chief Executive has reinstated operational command and control processes.
The Chief Executive and the Depute Chief Executive are meeting daily for operational situation reviews to consider emerging developments and operational risks. Additionally, we have “stood up” the established Civil Contingency Planning group (which includes Executive Officers, the HSCP Interim Chief Officer and the General Manager of EDLCT) to ensure that the organisation is planning and best prepared for the projected impact of omicron, particularly over the festive period.
We will provide elected members with a fuller service update technical note on Tuesday 21 December 2021.
Given, the operational focus in relation to civil contingency planning, officers may not be in a position to provide individual service updates in relation to elected member enquiries on our operational response at this time. We would like to thank you in advance for your understanding in relation to this and that with our focus on our operational response to the continued pandemic, other non-urgent member enquiries may not be able to be responded to within normal timescales.
We would thank members again for their support and co-operation in relation to the measures in place and the civil contingency planning taking place.