Over the last year, we have heard desperately sad stories of husbands and wives dying within days of each other, of brothers and sisters taken by the virus, of generations from the same family succumbing to COVID-19. They will be remembered in the hearts and minds of all those who know and loved them and, today, we remember them too. Wales will have two permanent living memorials to all those who have died, as we plant forests in north and south Wales. These will be spaces for families to come to remember their loved ones and places of reflection for others. Because this virus has taken something from each one of us here today; each one of us will know someone who has died or someone who has been ill.

The cost has been felt in ways in which we live our daily lives. It has interrupted our traditions from Christmas, Ramadan, Diwali and Hanukkah. It's cancelled weddings and changed the way we say goodbye to those whom we have lost. There has been a huge financial cost as businesses have closed, some of which will, sadly, never reopen, and jobs have been lost too. And the virus has fundamentally changed the ways we interact with each other, casting a shadow on all our lives. It's not just touching elbows instead of shaking hands, or Zoom calls replacing face-to-face meetings; the virus has taken human touch and human contact away from us. We have already seen the impact of the pandemic on our mental health and well-being in feelings of loneliness, isolation, anxiety and frustration, and, as we discussed earlier this afternoon, the full force of all of that may yet be to come.

And yet, Llywydd, as painful as the human cost has been, this extraordinary year has also shown the huge resilience of the human spirit and the phenomenal willingness of people in communities to help one another. Week after week, we have seen more people volunteering to help those who have been shielding and to support our public services; over 100 new volunteers coming forward again in just the last week. And as schools and shops have closed for prolonged periods, our homes have become classrooms and workplaces, and businesses have found innovative ways to offer services remotely. Rush-hour queues have almost disappeared, and we've learned how to deploy the 'mute' button—or at least most of us have most of the time.

Llywydd, I want to pay tribute to the remarkable way our public services have responded to the pandemic, and to the dedication and determination of the tens of thousands of people working in our NHS and care services and in all those day-to-day services we rely upon that are provided by our local authorities, and, beyond all that, I want to thank everybody who has put themselves at risk at work to serve others: in retail, bus, train and taxi drivers, teachers and school staff—the list is long and longer than I can set out this afternoon. It is your tireless work that has kept us all safe.

And the response to the pandemic in Wales has been a social partnership response, whether that's our successful test, trace protect service, which was built from scratch and which the Wales Audit Office said last week was making an important contribution to the management of COVID-19, whether it's securing supplies of personal protective equipment from Welsh businesses for the NHS and social care, or our world-leading genomic surveillance system in Wales, which is helping to identify new variants of the virus, and of course, our fantastic vaccination programme, which continues to go from strength to strength as it provides vaccines to people at incredible speed. In less than four months, Llywydd, thousands of NHS staff, supported by military personnel and volunteers, working from 600 centres, have given more than half the adult population of Wales their first dose of the vaccine, vaccination that gives us real hope for a better future and a different relationship with this virus—a future where we will be able to live with fewer restrictions.

Because, over the last 12 months, all four UK Governments have taken unprecedented decisions to protect people’s health and to control the spread of the virus. It's meant intervening in people's lives in ways not seen for generations. None of these decisions have been easy, and quite certainly none of them have been taken lightly, but they have been necessary to save lives and livelihoods.

I want to thank everyone in Wales for their support and help. Yours is the victory that has brought the virus under control time and again over the course of this year. It is only because people across our nation have followed the rules and kept ourselves and our families safe that we are now able to start relaxing those restrictions, carefully unlocking Wales sector by sector. And we will go on doing this gradually, step by step, so that we do not throw away any of the hard work and sacrifices 3 million people have made over the last three months, always mindful of how quickly this virus can return, as we have seen from the sobering experiences in Europe over the last week.

Llywydd, across Wales we have seen an enormous spirit of social solidarity and hundreds of thousands of individual small acts of kindness, even as so many lives have been disrupted and put on hold. It's because of that spirit that we start this spring and mark this anniversary with a sense of hope. Cases have fallen, the pressure on our NHS is receding; we have more and different tests available and vaccination on a mass scale. We are beginning to unlock our country and we are determined to do so in a way that keeps rates of the virus low. We will rebuild and recover, building a fairer and a greener Wales, in which no-one is held back and no-one is left behind.

Llywydd, we are living with coronavirus and are likely to be so for some time yet. But the tenacity of hope in the bad days and the audacity of hope in the better times are both part of the human condition. It's this that allows us to say that this year can be different and this year will be better than the last. Diolch yn fawr.