Llywydd, the Prime Minister asked the BBC yesterday for time to make an address to the nation given the position that we faced. The BBC suggested that the leader of the Government here in Wales should make a similar address to people in Wales. I think that is a tribute to the Senedd and to devolution: the fact that the BBC thought that here in Wales, with a Government of our own, people in Wales would want to hear from the leader of the Government. And far from it being a competition between the Senedd and other forms of letting our fellow citizens know of changes, I genuinely think Members should regard it as a sign of the way in which devolution, the work of the Senedd, the fact that we have our own democracy here in Wales, has taken root here in Wales, that the BBC thought that was the right thing to do. I have come here to answer your questions as soon as I have been able to do so and I see nothing at all that I have to apologise for in that.

The Member gets it so wrong in relation to this issue of six months. The reason I don't say six months is because I want to review these measures every three weeks, and if it is possible to lift them sooner, then that's what I want to do. The truth is so much the opposite of what he implies: I want to lift restrictions on people's lives as soon as we can safely do it, and I don't want to say to people that that could be six months away when if between the efforts we all can make together it would be possible to do that sooner. That is my ambition and it has been all the way through. I am really anxious every time we make a decision to restrict people's freedoms, and we do it simply because of the extraordinary times we live in and the risks that are posed to others. The sooner we can restore those freedoms to people, the better I will think that will be. That's the strategy I'm following and it's really not at all what the Member implied.

In a way that I don't think he seems able to recognise, his final two questions to me pointed in completely opposite directions. He started from a premise that I would agree with: there is more than one harm from coronavirus and not presenting yourself for investigations or treatment in the NHS for non-COVID purposes has been one of the harms that coronavirus has caused. As I said in my answer to Andrew R.T. Davies, the NHS in Wales is open for people and I hope very much that they will make use of it. Having recognised that there is more than one harm, he then wanted me to reimpose on shielded people a blanket set of restrictions that we know have come with harms to people as well as the protections that those restrictions offered. So, we have put advice to shielded people in line with the advice that we have had from our chief medical officer and all the other chief medical officers across the United Kingdom.

It still is our advice to shielded people that they should take particular care, that they should ask themselves even more searching questions about who they meet with and where they go, but it is not, we think, proportionate now to say to them that they should not leave their homes for any exercise, and if they felt confident in doing it, they could go, for example, to collect their own prescriptions, and that's because we're trying to balance the harms. The harms that come from people with vulnerable health conditions being exposed to coronavirus are very real. The harms that come from saying to people that they should never leave their homes are real as well, in the impact on those people's sense of well-being and isolation. The advice we're giving to shielded people, and which the chief medical officer may well wish to reiterate and update in any fresh letter he may send, is designed to hold that in balance, just as—in the way that I agree with the Member—our advice to people about using the NHS must be in balance as well.