Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:11 pm on 13 May 2020.
I'd like to start with the 'Test Trace Protect' document and thank the Minister for its publication. It's useful because it adds to our sum of knowledge about what Government is trying to achieve, but I think a detailed plan for testing, tracing and isolating was long overdue, and I think it remains, unfortunately, long overdue. What we have here is largely a statement of principle that few would disagree with, in reality: that having a test and trace strategy is vital in the battle against coronavirus and that it will need to bring lots of different partners together to deliver it.
We all, surely, hope to be able to start moving towards significantly lifting restrictions in the not-too-distant future. That's what we all hope for, but we can't start thinking of significantly lifting lockdown restrictions before we have a robust test and trace plan, and I don't think this can be described as anything like a robust, comprehensive or detailed plan, so we'll wait for that.
The document mentions, as we heard, potentially, the need for 10,000 tests a day—it's clear on that—double the current capacity that we know has taken a very long time to reach, yet Public Health Wales suggest the range of numbers of symptomatic people you may have to test is between 7,500 and 17,000. Surely, that's what we should be aiming for. There is reference to 20,000 later in the paper, but it's very unclear from the document what that refers to. I think you may have made it a bit clearer in your oral statement, but, in terms of the document itself, it's very unclear.
It's not just about the numbers, it's about how you process those tests and go about the tracing. You talk of easy and rapid access to testing. How quick do we need—how rapid does it need to be in order to be effective? What's the local level of access to all our communities going to be to this, given that we only have a certain number of mass testing centres?
A strategy, at the end of the day, is only as good as the implementation plan that we need to put it into action, and there's no detailed plan here that I can see to put the already widely accepted principles into practice. So, when can we expect that strategy that we have to turn into something that can get us ready to actually lift restrictions, not just talk about it in abstract terms?