The first minister has confirmed St Andrews will house the first of 11 walk-in coronavirus testing centres.
Nicola Sturgeon announced during her daily Covid-19 briefing on Tuesday that the first of these would be located in the Victory Memorial Hall in St Andrews.
Together with the 10 other local walk-in centres that will eventually be established across Scotland, they will help to increase sampling capacity by more than 3,000 tests a day.
The move comes amid a “major spike” in demand for tests across Scotland over the weekend, which led to “some constraints” on the booking portal.
A total of 44 new cases was reported over the last 24 hours, with seven of these in Tayside.
In terms of the outbreak at the 2 Sisters chicken factory in Coupar Angus, there are now 152 positives cases associated with the cluster, of which 134 were workers and 18 were contacts.
Contact tracing is continuing, with the First Minister confirming she expects numbers to continue to rise in the days to come.
Over the past six days, the mobile testing unit at the factory has tested more than 900 people, with other testing sites across Dundee, Forfar and Perth, testing more than 2,500 people so far.
Ms Sturgeon said: “At this stage, there is still no evidence of wider community transmission from this outbreak and that, of course, is positive given the scale of the outbreak we have been dealing with.”
Employees and their households were thanked for their co-operation and reminded to resist the temptation to “nip out” in order to tackle the outbreak.
The First Minister was asked during the briefing about reports some workers at the plant had broken self-isolation by heading to a nearby supermarket before and after being tested.
In response, Ms Sturgeon said everyone has an “individual responsibility” to contain the spread of the virus.
She added: “Every time somebody doesn’t self-isolate when they’re being advised to, we are risking seeing that virus spread from somebody else from another household and once that starts to happen, then that community transmission becomes a big risk.”
The public was also reminded during the daily briefing that they should only book a test if they have symptoms of a new cough, fever or loss or change of taste or smell.
Exceptions to that general position include if an individual is advised to get a test by Test and Protect or those who work in a profession that may require it, such as staff working in schools.
On the issue of capacity, the First Minister said they have “always known there would be fluctuations in demands for testing”.
But she added that along with the 11 new walk-in test centres, the Scottish Government will also be deploying three mobile testing units in the central belt and increasing testing at regional test centres using additional NHS testing capacity.
