7. The Health Protection (Coronavirus Restrictions) (No. 5) (Wales) (Amendment) (No. 17) Regulations 2021

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:52 pm on 5 October 2021.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 4:52, 5 October 2021

I think we have plenty of evidence of the need to take this measure. Public Health Wales has all the evidence you might need from people who went to music festivals over the summer and the numbers who returned with COVID. We know that, when young people congregate together, that is when the spread of infection occurs. And one of the really disturbing things is that, although we've got 564 per 100,000 infected in Cardiff in the general population, young people have infection rates that are twice that. And guess who goes to nightclubs; young people, in the main. So, if I want to catch COVID, there's no shortage of opportunities. I've got thousands of students milling around, going to all these three university campuses and partying on a nightly basis, and no doubt they are spreading COVID as we speak. 

So, what we need to do is to be realistic about what we can do to encourage young people to take this seriously. There was a 15-year-old last week, in Portsmouth, who died of COVID four days after she got it, and she was a healthy young woman who did lots of sport. So, I know it's a rarer occurrence than in the older population, but COVID is a very nasty disease and you can't say that you won't have a poor outcome. So, let's try to prevent people catching it in the first place. 

I don't understand why a nightclub wouldn't want to screen their customers, to make sure that their venue is not being used as a super-spreading event, which would cause them to have to close down while they were doing a deep clean.