15. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: Update on Local Coronavirus Restrictions

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:45 pm on 29 September 2020.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 6:45, 29 September 2020

In terms of your point about local action as opposed to countywide action, I think I've dealt with that in response to Andrew R.T. Davies. It's a regular part of consideration, and you'll see that we've made that choice within Carmarthenshire. We regularly consider the advice that we get from the local incident management teams on the pattern of infection that exists, and we then have to make choices based on the local evidence and intelligence of that. If we're in a position to have a different pattern of measures coming into force, then we would do so. This is all about how we keep Wales safe and how we keep individual communities and groups of communities safe across the country as well.

In terms of your point about loneliness and isolation and the mental health and well-being of people, this is something that we have regularly considered throughout. It's part of the reason why the household bubbles or extended households have been introduced, to make sure that there's a predictable pattern of people meeting each other indoors, because the greatest risk of infection is from your family and your friends. You'll have heard from Rob Orford, the chief scientific adviser on health, last week in the health committee that they are the people who you are most likely to give coronavirus to or to acquire coronavirus from. It's a very, very difficult measure to break apart those household bubble arrangements and its one of the more difficult parts of decision making that we have to confront, so we don't do it lightly.

We are looking, as you know, at individual measures to see whether we can do more, because, certainly, as I've recognised in the statement, I recognise that the measures we take to protect people's lives come with a cost, and, as I say, that is not something that we do lightly at all.

In terms of your regular commentary about testing, you'll be aware that there was no consequential on offer in terms of the lighthouse lab programme. It was a programme for us either to take part in or not, and much of the commentary at the outset was why we weren't taking part in the programme, and you'll recall that I indicated previously that that was because we weren't able to have the data flowing in to us. We are now. We've been able to do it in a consistent way in Wales throughout that period of time. It's why we haven't had some of the challenges that England had recently for a couple of days on the NHS COVID app, because we've managed to arrange our system to have all of that information flowing into the Welsh system and going to our contact tracers and more broadly.

It's also the case, of course, that we're not the only Government that has taken part in the lighthouse lab testing programme. The SNP Government in Scotland took part much earlier than we did, as did the multiparty Government in Northern Ireland. We have, alongside that, built up our own capacity and now we regularly have 3,000 to 4,000 Public Health Wales lab tests being run each day. We expect to see that expanded in the coming days as a regular part and feature of our system. So, we're actually in a place where that is helping to sustain the Welsh testing process at present, whilst we look for lighthouse labs to recover, and we're building into it the expected increase in demand.

On your point on the speed of tracing and not just the success of it, this is a genuine good-news story for Wales. We should be very proud of what our public servants have done across health and local government working together. In the last week when we've published figures, 94 per cent of new cases were successfully traced, and in terms of their contacts, 86 per cent of their contacts were successfully traced and 73 per cent of those contacts were traced within 24 hours. So, we're getting to high numbers of people and we're getting to them very quickly as well. What we want, though, is more information provided to us more quickly to allow our contact tracers to do their job, because that is an essential part of keeping all the other forms of activity open for business across Wales, whether in high or low prevalence areas. But I generally think that people on all political sides and shades can take a share of credit for what NHS Wales test, trace and protect is delivering right across the country.

In terms of the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, the CMO's office has sent out a reminder to all parts of the service about testing patients before they come in. Staff are being tested within the Royal Glamorgan, and any decisions that are made about any further control measures will take place following consideration by the local management team and the local public health agency, together with the local authority as a key partner. Because we will need to think about who needs to be in that hospital and how the red and green zones that are in place in the Royal Glamorgan and in other hospitals—to make sure they're functioning effectively. We understand that some of this is about transmission within the hospital and some of it also comes from the reality that there is a community reservoir of coronavirus that has risen over the last few weeks, which is why Rhondda Cynon Taf is part of the local restrictions regime that we have in place across a number of authorities in Wales. But as and when there is a decision to be made, it'll be a matter for the local health board to take some of these steps, but if I need to make a decision, then I'll make sure that I communicate that to Members and the public as soon as possible.