Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 29 April 2020.
Llywydd, I thank Paul Davies again for those questions. On testing, the current testing plan that is in place involves testing patients, relatives, staff members, key workers—people who are in the front line of the current outbreak. We will need a different testing regime as restrictions come to be lifted, because, at that point, however carefully, however cautiously we go about it, the risk of coronavirus spreading in the community will be greater then than it is now, under the conditions of lockdown.
At that point—I agree with what Paul Davies said—that's when you need to have a community capacity of 'test, track and isolate'. The number of tests available in Wales is increasing—it's 2,100 today; it was 1,800 at the end of last week—and we've made good progress, over the last week, in making sure that care home residents and care home staff have access to the testing that is available.
We are further increasing our testing capacity this week—today, with the opening of facilities in Llandudno, which are both drive-through and mobile. We will have facilities available at Nant-y-ci in Carmarthen as of tomorrow. And we will continue to build that testing capacity.
The reason we don't offer tests to everybody in care homes, symptomatic and asymptomatic, is because the clinical evidence tells us that there is no value in doing so. Because of that, we don't do it. We offer the testing where the advice to us is that it's clinically right to do that. Testing people who have no symptoms today—for that to be a reliable message to them, you'd have to test them again tomorrow, because you can go from having no symptoms to having the symptoms in 24 hours. Using the capacity we have in that way would be to divert the capacity away from where it is clinically worthwhile to doing things where the clinical case for doing so is not one that has been advised to us, and that is why we're not doing it.
We are working with the care home sector to consider a wider testing remit in those care homes where there is clearly an outbreak of coronavirus. The case for wider testing there may be clinically stronger. That's being explored by our clinicians with the care home sector. And, of course, if we make further moves in that direction, we will inform the Assembly of that.
Paul Davies's final point, Llywydd, was the important one about the NHS having the capacity to cope with an upturn in coronavirus as we move out of lockdown. That is part of our framework and our plan. It's part of the reason why we continue to work on the field hospital capacity in Wales. As of today, we have thousands of beds available in the main NHS, including 3,000 acute care beds, and we have fewer critical care beds occupied today than we did this time last week. But we're not relying on that continuing to be the case as we move beyond lockdown, and we will monitor and, where necessary, augment the capacity that the health service has to make sure that, in doing the right thing—and I do think that finding the right way out of lockdown is the right thing—we don't end up putting ourselves back in the position that we've all worked so hard to try to come out of.