Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 2 February 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:45, 2 February 2021

I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for those questions and of course associate myself with what he said in opening about the families of those three men who are missing at sea in north Wales. I know there will be people right across Wales who have followed the events in north Wales, including the enormous efforts that have been made to locate the people who are missing, and to offer, as Andrew R.T. Davies said, comfort to their families. This must be the most awful time for them.

My assessment of the state of the pandemic in Wales is this: because of the decisions that were taken to put Wales into a level 4 series of measures before Christmas, we are seeing the benefit of that in the period since the turn of the year. The number of people suffering from coronavirus is going down every day. It's down below 140 per 100,000 today. The positivity rate is going down every day, down to just about 11 per cent today. The number of people in our hospitals with coronavirus has started to come down—it's not down anything like enough, but the trend is now downwards—and we've seen the first impact of that in our critical care capacity as well. All of those are very important achievements, and, alongside the mass vaccination programme, give us hope that, as we go further into this year, it will be possible to restore some of the freedoms to people in Wales that they have had to manage without over recent weeks. But all of that is based on foundations that can shift at any moment, and the examples that the leader of the opposition pointed to—the Kent variant and developments there, the South African variant—while things are moving in the right direction, there's a fragility about all of that. And we've seen, in other parts of the world, including parts of the world very close to us, how a set of promising indicators can turn into a set of very difficult indicators in a matter of just a few short weeks.