Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:09 pm on 5 August 2020.
Llywydd, I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for those questions. Well, to be clear, face masks are compulsory in the Wrexham Maelor, and have been since the outbreak was declared, and the view of the Welsh Government is that face masks should be used where there is a clinical case for doing so. There isn't a clinical case for wearing them in places where the virus is in such suppressed circulation that they do not add anything material to people's protection, but where there is a case, a clinical case, for them being used, of course they should be used, and they are in the Maelor because of the situation there.
As far as test turnaround is concerned, Llywydd, as I said in my statement, 13,330 tests were returned last week within 24 hours—the highest number ever. But I wanted to make this one other point to Andrew and for others: at the moment, the way we record these things in Wales is we record every test as though it needed to be back within 24 hours, and that simply isn't sensible. Anybody who is symptomatic, anybody who is going to a hospital, anybody who is being tested in the community in Wrexham—those needed to be back as rapidly as possible. But we carry out thousands of tests in care homes every week of people who aren't symptomatic at all on a surveillance basis. The case for turning those around in 24 hours really is very week indeed, and it would be very difficult for care homes to do that because they rely on shift patterns and running the home in the way that they do, and it takes them longer than a day to return the tests that they receive to the lab. And the clock starts ticking the moment they receive the test, not the moment that the lab receives the test.
Now, we record all of these as though every test were equally urgent. That is not a sensible way to do it and it puts perverse pressures into the system. So, what I want to do is to be able to report to people in Wales, of all the tests that we carry out, the ones where a 24-hour turnaround is clinically important and the ones that are being done for surveillance purposes, where if it takes 48 hours for the results to come back, it really doesn't matter from a clinical point of view.
Last week, the prevalence rates for staff in care homes, of all the people we test every week, was 0.1 per cent, and some of those will turn out to be false positives as well on retesting. The case for pressurising the system to get them back in 24 hours isn't good, and we must make sure that those tests don't get in front of the ones where the clinical case for a quick turnaround is genuine.