Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:46 pm on 16 March 2021.
Diolch, Llywydd. First Minister, today we mark the very sombre anniversary of the first recorded death as a result of COVID-19 in Wales. You've talked about the need for a future public inquiry that will seek to identify lessons from the last 12 months. Do you share the view, as I do, recently expressed by Sir Mansel Aylward, that one of the clear lessons is that there was a failure to properly plan and prepare for the pandemic? Specifically, do you think that the emphasis on influenza to the exclusion of coronaviruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome or middle east respiratory syndrome in the pandemic plan led to some of the early mistakes in the response? The science around a flu pandemic suggested it was very, very difficult, or even futile, to try and suppress community transmission once it's become endemic, which isn't the case, as we now know, with COVID. Does that explain the two principal mistakes early on—the failure to adopt lockdown restrictions sufficiently early and the abandonment of community test and trace, later readopted, of course?