The COVID pandemic has had an absolutely cataclysmic effect on very many people. Lives have been lost from COVID and for non-COVID reasons, and other lives have been changed forever, touched by grief, loss and tragedy. Others continue to suffer the debilitating effect of long COVID, and all this applies, yes, to patients and people everywhere, but also to NHS and care staff. Some staff have lost their lives by going to work.

The motion recognises the hard work, dedication and commitment of staff in the healthcare sector, but, sometimes, these words just slip out without pausing. The reality that is COVID: the terror on the wards in the early days with inadequate PPE and inadequate testing and just not knowing, fear stalked wards, staff felt exposed and in danger. We had an already overstretched health service going above and beyond, an exhausted workforce trying to catch up on routine demand during the so-called quiet summer months, before being stretched again now as the case numbers rise, hospital occupancy rises and beds in intensive care become full again. This time, both COVID and non-COVID cases are being dealt with, but the capacity is not there. Asymptomatic viral transfer means striving for COVID-free wards, but COVID-free wards are a huge ask and currently probably unachievable. COVID-lite is as good as it gets. Courtesy of changing all the PPE kit all the time, between every patient, the throughput of patients has taken a huge hit now.

So, there is a long list of things to do, and the various royal colleges are telling us what to do. We still need to get on top of COVID, and many doctors still have huge concerns about the UK Government's privatised test and trace service, with some doctors calling it a lethal mistake. Creating a testing and tracing system from scratch using private companies, none with any public health experience, in the middle of a pandemic, separate from the existing public health NHS testing and tracing system—I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

A highly efficient contact system is vital, and supported isolation is key. Paying people £800 to isolate, contacting people in isolation regularly every day, arranging hotel accommodation where appropriate—it works in other countries. This isolation has to be supported and enabled for the good of us all. Local NHS and public health testing and contact tracing works brilliantly well. We need to strive to only do that, and phase out the private UK system dogged by delays, inaccuracies and failure, resulting in only around 20 to 30 per cent of people that are contacts, that should be isolating, actually isolating. The rest are merrily spreading the virus around without knowing. We need to redirect resources to our public health NHS and GPs, testing and contact tracing as we've always done for any other notifiable infectious disease down the years—TB, malaria, salmonella, measles and so on and so on. Involve GPs in testing and tracing, supply pulse oximeters to people and primary care. Community COVID can be tackled safely outside hospitals, testing and tracing is here for the long term, so let's plan properly long term.

Finally, the calamitous effect of COVID is common to all health services. We know the lengthening waiting times here in Wales. Over the border, the situation in Conservative-run England is no better—worse, if anything. The number of people in England waiting more than 52 weeks for elective treatment reached 139,545 in September 2020. That is not 10 times more than the previous year, not 20 times more than the previous year, not 50 times more than the previous year, but 107 times more than the number in September 2019.

Vaccines are a superb discovery, absolutely game changing, but not here yet. We still have a winter illness season and a rampant COVID pandemic to tackle first, with exhausted overstretched staff everywhere. We can all do our bit. Welsh Government needs to sort out testing and tracing contacts now, and get supported isolation up and running as soon as possible.