Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:05 pm on 17 November 2020.
Those are very important points that the Member makes. He's absolutely right that, in the early months of coronavirus, people living in deprived communities experienced mortality rates almost double those in less deprived areas, and we certainly saw the effect of that in the Rhondda Cynon Taf local authority area. The first thing that we have to do, Llywydd, is to get on top of the impact that the current second wave is having on our hospital services, because at the moment, our hospitals are having to deal with the immediate crisis of more people coming through the door for this reason, and that, inevitably, has an impact on their ability to go on providing other services such as the rehabilitation services to which David Melding referred. I know that he will be glad to have seen the fall in the incidence rate in RCT over the last seven days. A week ago, it was 478 per 100,000 in the population; today, it's 259. The positivity rate has fallen from over 25 per cent to 18 per cent. And, in the last couple of days, in hospitals in the RCT area, there are now 14 confirmed cases in critical care—that's the lowest since 27 October. There are 206 confirmed cases in other acute beds in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area—that's 50 lower than the same day last week and 64 lower than the highest point, which was on 3 November. And it's provided we can go on bearing down on the current flare up of numbers that the health board will then have the capacity to be able to attend to the longer-term consequences. I agree with the point that David Melding was making that if you have an older, sicker, poorer population, then those long-term impacts are likely to be more profound.