COVID-19: Testing for Care Home Staff

Part of 6. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 2:50 pm on 15 July 2020.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:50, 15 July 2020

There were quite a lot of points there, acting Deputy Presiding Officer, and I'll try to run through them as quickly as possible. I don't accept the accusation that the announcement today and the written statement amount to a serious affront to the Welsh Parliament. In fact, I only signed off the new testing strategy very late last night, and I'm very happy to answer Members' questions in a very busy day in Plenary. 

On the end point that Janet Finch-Saunders made on turnaround, as she'll have heard from the First Minister today, actually, it's not correct to say that this is about NHS Wales's laboratory seeing a reduction; we actually saw an increase over the last week in turnaround times. There was a specific issue, a technical issue, in the lighthouse lab in Manchester that serves north Wales, and that's had a material impact on our turnaround times. You'll see in the next week's testing figures that we had a significant increase in testing over the weekend, with over 22,000 test results over the weekend, the majority of them in lighthouse labs, and I expect us to make continued progress forward. I am certainly aware of the importance of quick turnaround times through our contact tracing service. 

On whether we should alarmed at the two-week proposal, no, we should not be alarmed. This is actually good news, and it's good news because it reflects the very low prevalence of coronavirus in our care homes. We're now at a rate where the range of positive results is well within the range for false positives—where positive results are returned but they're not necessarily true positive results. We're also in a position where, as the Member wanted to compare us with England, actually, it's less than 1 per cent prevalence within care homes staff—significantly less than 1 per cent—whereas in England it's 2.4 per cent; a material difference. And also, they haven't quite completed their care home testing programme within England. We're in a different position, and if we continue to see very low prevalence within our care homes, then we can safely reduce the frequency to a two-week, a fortnightly retesting, which is still a very regular programme of retesting within the care home environment for our staff. 

The evidence that will be published later today confirms that, on asymptomatic testing generally and the current antigen test, it's not a good way to make use of that test to simply test large groups of asymptomatic people. So, we won't be rolling it out to other groups in an unqualified way. We'll be looking, as the strategy sets out in the written statement I've issued today, at evidence for where we think it's the right thing to deploy test results for a wider and larger population. And it's worth Members bearing in mind the very clear statements from the Royal College of Pathologists about needing to have a testing programme that isn't simply obsessed about something that is done and counted; that isn't a marker of the success of our programme. Testing has to have a purpose. If you look at prevalence rates for coronavirus in Wales, we're in a very good position for a variety of reasons and the testing programme is part of that, but it's about how we use tests and how we continue to keep people here in Wales safe.