3. Statement by the First Minister: Health Protection Measures Post Firebreak

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:00 pm on 3 November 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 4:00, 3 November 2020

Equally rapidly, as I said, the chief executive of the NHS said things earlier today on hospital transmission, and I'll ask Members to look at what he said. I am concerned—I should have said it in answer to Mark Isherwood's question when he talked about people avoiding the NHS. I don't want us to head back to where we were back in April, when there was so much coronavirus in our hospitals that people didn't feel safe in going there for other purposes. That's yet another reason why we need to make the very most of this firebreak period and persuade people to behave in different ways beyond it.

On the technologies, as I've said, the health Minister will issue a statement later this week on some of those technological possibilities and how we are preparing for them. I too recognise what Rhun ap Iorwerth said about there being better treatments available in this second wave than in the first, and you can actually see that, I think, already, to an extent, in the slower path of people from hospital beds into critical care. We do have more people in critical care beds in Wales than we had three weeks ago, that's inevitable, but the rate at which hospital patients are converting into critical care patients is not what it was in the first wave, and that is because we have those additional treatments.

Of course I recognise the points that Rhun made about tourism as well as hospitality. Tourism will be able to resume in Wales, but it will inevitably be on the reduced basis that comes without our largest market, in the sense that the largest number of people who travel to Wales for tourism come from England, and that won't be happening over the next four weeks.