Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 16 March 2021.
Well, Llywydd, let me thank Adam Price for drawing attention to the very sober and sombre day it is when we mark the anniversary of the first death from coronavirus here in Wales, an experience that has been repeated for far, far too many families. I was very glad today to be able to make the announcement of commemorative woodland, in both north and south Wales, where families who have experienced that loss will be able to have permanent memorial to that awful experience. Mr Price is right as well, Llywydd, to point to the fact that pandemic planning across the United Kingdom had largely focused on influenza, and the lessons that were drawn from earlier experiences of that.
I think it is too early to talk of mistakes and to attributing causes to things that could have been done differently. I'm quite sure that things would have been done differently if we knew then what we know now. So, that's not in any way to deny that things could have been done differently. Being able to say, 'It was because if this, or because of that, and, if we'd known, we'd have done something differently'—I think that's much harder to be definitive. There needs to be an inquiry. That inquiry needs to be on a UK basis, otherwise it will never make sense of the experience here in Wales in a full way, and it needs to be done at a time when the system—which is still focused, every single day, on dealing with the very real impacts of the public health emergency—has the space it needs to be able to think about and contribute to the questions that such an inquiry will rightly raise.