I strongly support this motion, because what is most glaring about our experience of coronavirus is the lack of evidence that the lockdown, the draconian lockdown, has had any useful purpose at all. It was based originally on predictions by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London that proved to be utterly absurd in the event, and the Swedish Government received studies based upon Professor Ferguson's model if they didn't introduce a lockdown, and that model projected that their critical-care demand in Sweden would peak at above 16,000 or even 20,000 a day, whereas in fact the reality, in the outcome, was 500 a day. A difference of that kind is not science. That is statistical manipulation; it's junk science.

What we do know about coronavirus is that 98 per cent of the people who contract it either have no symptoms at all, or they certainly don't have anything like serious or critical symptoms. It affects in a severe way 2 per cent of those who contract it, and what we know also about the deaths from coronavirus is that 80 per cent of them have been people aged over 80. This virus does not attack people who are part of the working population on the whole. Nobody who's economically active in Wales, beyond a very small number, is likely to be at risk from a relaxation of the lockdown. There's a much greater risk from continuing it than there is from relaxing it.

Nobody, of course, can prove these predictions; you can't prove the future. But what we can do is look at the past, see what has happened, and see how it measures up with what was then predicted before these measures were introduced, and the reality is that the measures simply don't add up as having been worthwhile; in fact, they've been wholly counter-productive. When you look at the experience of countries that have relaxed their lockdowns or didn't have them at all, like Sweden, we find that the infection rate in the United Kingdom was far higher in the first place, and also the death rate of the United Kingdom was far higher. Per 1 million people, 4,500 people in the UK have contracted coronavirus, and the death rate has been 632 per million. In Sweden, there's a higher infection rate at 6,000 per million, but a lower death rate at only 500 per million. In Austria, a much, much lower infection rate of below 2,000, and almost no deaths at all—only 77 in the whole country, according to the Worldometer website today. Germany, similarly: half the infection rate that we've had in this country with only 100 deaths, instead of the 632 deaths per million that we've got.

So, of the people who die from the virus, we know also that 90 per cent of them have had at least one pre-existing condition—90 per cent of the cases. Twenty per cent of the people who have died from coronavirus had dementia or Alzheimer's disease; these are not people who are part of the working population and need to be protected from their own personal irresponsibilities. The great tragedy of the coronavirus is that the Government has applied entirely the wrong remedy to the crisis right from the start. It's concentrated on locking down the whole economy, whilst not protecting the people who were most at risk in nursing homes and care homes. It's like going to hospital for heart surgery to find that your surgeon, instead of having a collection of scalpels, has come into the operating theatre with a chainsaw.

Now, the virus—. Sorry. The R rate, the rate of transmission of the virus, which the Government bases its policy on, is itself only an average of what they think it might be, and actually disguises the reality of coronavirus, which is that what we know is that a great proportion of the serious cases that have developed, and this is not just in Britain, this is throughout the world, have come from a very small number of super-spreaders. Eighty per cent of the cases in Hong Kong have come from 20 per cent of the initial cases. So, the R rate is a mythical figure that can't be calculated anyway because we don't know what proportion of the population has got any kind of natural immunity. We've all acquired some sort of immunity from coronavirus because we've all had the common cold. Nobody actually knows how protective these immunities are, but we do know from other circumstances that there must be such cross immunities.

Can you remember the Diamond Princess cruise ship right at the start of the crisis? A small, confined environment, where the disease was allowed to run rampant for weeks before it was recognised as a major problem. Only 19 per cent of the passengers on that vessel actually contracted the coronavirus. Professor Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, says that the coronavirus has followed the same pattern worldwide, irrespective of the lockdown policies of different Governments. Professor Yonathan Freund, a professor of emergency medicine at the Sorbonne university, says that a second wave can be absolutely ruled out from what we know of the epidemiology of the disease. So, when Rhup ap Iorwerth says that we need to prove our case, then I'm basing what I say on the science and on the scientists, not on statistical modellers, because statistical modelling is not science.

Another factor that's involved in coronavirus as well, and all viruses actually, is we don't know enough about them to know about the progress of diseases and why they behave in the way that they do. Many viruses disappear like SARS did, for no reason that is apparent at all. Six months after SARS appeared on the planet, it disappeared. Professor David Heymann, a professor in infectious disease epidemiology at the London school of tropical health and tropical medicine, who headed the global response to SARS at the World Health Organization, has pointed out that SARS spread easily and killed a tenth of those who were infected, but actually disappeared within six months.