3. Statement by the First Minister: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:09 pm on 6 May 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:09, 6 May 2020

Llywydd, can I thank Adam Price for drawing attention to the figures that were published yesterday? They'll be part, now, of a regular series in which we put into the public domain, in one place, drawing together the very sobering facts of the impact of coronavirus on care homes here in Wales. Members will be able to see that every week.

And can I thank Adam Price as well for pointing to that variation on my answers to Paul Davies? Because there was evidence—Members will be able to find it amongst the citations I offered earlier—that, in larger care and nursing homes, there is a clinical point to testing even non-symptomatic settings, and that's because the larger homes are more susceptible—are more susceptible—to the spread of coronavirus, for a number of different reasons. They're often focused more in the nursing home end of the care home sector, and, as Adam Price will know, having seen the figures, there is a greater concentration of deaths in care where nursing is part of care than in the rest of the sector, as you might expect given that coronavirus attacks people with underlying health conditions.

And another reason why larger care homes have been treated differently is because they have a larger number of people going in and out of them. And the more traffic there is between the outside world and a care home, the greater the risk becomes that coronavirus will be imported into the care home—whether that is by workers coming back and forth, whether it is in the rare occasions where family members may visit somebody who is terminally ill; the more visits there are to a care home, the higher the risk becomes, and the bigger the care home, the more visitors and staff members going in and out there will be. And those are amongst the reasons why the advice was that testing of asymptomatic people in the larger care homes did have a clinical purpose that we have included that as part of our testing regime.