So if she goes for social distancing/gathering restrictions, how is she going to find the money to compensate the hospitality sector, or will she just let businesses go to the wall?
People can read the actual evidence paper produced for the Scottish Ministers at
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/conte...ccine-certification-evidence-paper-update.pdf .
Adding a negative test option to a certification scheme would be less objectionable and create less problems for business, should the scheme be expanded than a pure vaccine passport scheme. But there is a case that a return to updated local Covid protection levels would be less disruptive and damaging to business. The systems, staff knowledge, working methods are already in place for dealing with that, whereas vaccine passports open up new additional hardware, infrastructure and training costs - potentially extra staff costs too and the hospitality sector is experiencing severe shortages of staff in much of Scotland as it is, plus it introduces a flashpoint between customers and staff that isn't there with social distancing and table service in hospitality.
There are also cases where having vaccine passport checks will introduce a requirement for staff - customer interactions with every customer where that interaction isn't currently necessary, opening up transmission pathways instead of closing them down.
As an example, 3 of the Scottish Ski Areas set up for wholly online ticketing for level 4 operations last winter, this means people can book and collect tickets without having to interact with a staff member and avoids ticket queues removing a potential opportunity for transmission. If a covid certification scheme was extended to the snowsports areas, then staff would need to manually process and verify every individual skier and snowboarder prior to activating tickets - not just each ticket purchaser, this would create substantial queues and shift the ticketing process from one of minimal staff-customer interaction into one of greatly increased staff customer interactions.
The evidence of what is happening elsewhere across Europe is not encouraging for continuing as we are into winter, but Scotland has remained fairly steady for around 8 weeks now and the past few days there is tentative signs of a slight drop in daily cases again.
