Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 8 April 2020.
Diolch, Caroline. I thought you set out very convincingly at the start of what you said that huge range of individuals and occupations who are engaged in the collective effort we're making here in Wales. We rightly focus on healthcare workers and social care workers, but the effort goes well beyond that, and you set that out at the start of your contribution.
Briefly, to run through some of those questions, there is a small minority of people who somehow believe that coronavirus doesn't mean them, but it's a virus that is no respecter of people or of places, and we just have to go on reminding them, and some of the difficult examples that they will have seen of individuals surely will convince them that this is not a virus that reserves itself for the elderly or for people with underlying health conditions. Anybody can get it and anybody can get it very badly.
The motor neurone disease point has been raised this morning with the chief medical officer here in Wales, and he is carrying out a piece of work immediately to see if there's anything further we need to do on that. Of course, I agree with what Caroline Jones said—that the best way to preserve yourself is to avoid contact with other people. But I do have the most enormous sympathy for people who find themselves confined to home in circumstances that are even more challenging for them than they would be for others—if you are looking after somebody with dementia, for example, who's no longer able to go out in the way that they could before; if you have a child with autism, whose life depends upon routine and regularity and being able to go to places where they know people and where life is predictable, and suddenly life is not predictable at all, and you're having to deal with all of that as well as everything you have to do yourself. So, of course I agree with what Caroline Jones said about people sticking to the rules, remaining at home, but I do think that all of us, our hearts would go out, wouldn't they, to people who are having to cope with all of that in circumstances that will be so very challenging.
On businesses and reasonable measures, we put that in there because the more we discuss this with business organisations in Wales, the more apparent it becomes the huge range of different sorts of businesses there are in Wales, and workplace settings. The huge majority of businesses in Wales already are enormously thoughtful about their workforce—as I said in my opening statement, their most important asset—are already doing everything, but we wanted to use the force of law behind the advice that has been there all along, and to bear down on that minority of businesses where people say to us—I'm sure they say to you—when they write to us as individual Members, 'I've got to go to work but I don't feel safe when I'm there', and the change in the law in Wales is designed to be on the side of those people.
We're in a global competition for PPE. As a Welsh Government, we've had no direct discussions with the US Government, but we are sure that those discussions will be happening at a UK level.
And just finally to say I completely recognise the point that Caroline Jones made about misinformation. That is no respecter of national boundaries, and it requires an international effort to try to make sure that we bear down on it wherever we see it. The positive advice, though, is to rely on trusted sources of advice and, here in Wales, the Public Health Wales website, the Welsh Government website, the NHS Wales websites—those are places you can go knowing that the advice you get is the product of people who know what they're talking about. Rely on that and don't get drawn into those other sources of information that we know are designed to throw people down the wrong track.