Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 17 November 2020.
Well, Llywydd, this second wave of coronavirus has had an impact on care homes here in Wales, despite the very careful preparation that the sector made during the summer and the additional investment that the Welsh Government has made in that as well. This is a deadly and highly infectious disease, and as levels of coronavirus in the community rise, so the threats to closed communities, such as hospitals and care homes, rise as well, and it's a very sad number that the Member referred to at the start of his question.
As to test results, the delays in test results are almost exclusively from the lighthouse lab system, and those are not in our hands, although performance there has improved in the last three weeks and we look to that system to go on improving. When there is a positive case then we use the Welsh system, because that does get people results back within 24 or 48 hours, and we'll continue to do that. The false positive issue, I'm afraid, is not that significant an issue at the moment. False positives happen when there are very low levels of coronavirus. As the levels of coronavirus rise, then false positives don't occur in the same way. So, at the moment, it is not a problem that is the most significant one we face in the care home sector. It was a particular problem when levels of coronavirus were at their lowest ebb amongst care home staff, where positive results did turn out often not to be genuine, but I'm afraid as the numbers rise, then that is not the problem that it used to be.
As to the point that the Member raised about people discharged from hospital into care homes, there is a lot more analysis that is needed of those figures to make proper sense of them. We don't know where those tests were carried out. It is possible they were carried out in the care home to which the person who lives in that care home was being returned. It is possible that it happened not in the hospital episode before someone was discharged back into the care home, but in a previous hospital episode. So, there are important things that we need to learn about where the tests were carried out, when they were carried out and what impact they may have had. That is why we have said that we will carry out further analysis of the figures that were published yesterday, and I think it would be sensible for anybody to wait. The Member's been very keen on data in previous weeks in this Chamber and I think he would be wise to wait until we have that extra data before we draw any conclusions.
To end, Llywydd, by going back to the point I made to the Member: he could have offered us a simple 'yes', couldn't he? He could simply have said that, in the crucial support that he was keen to ask me about earlier, the £1,000 and more that 35 per cent of families in Wales are about to lose, he might just have added his voice to those of us who would like to persuade the Chancellor not to allow that to happen.