COVID-19 Rates

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:50 pm on 3 November 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 2:50, 3 November 2021

Thanks. I think you'll find that what we've been doing is using the measure, where we determine what we do in terms of lockdown or not, of whether the NHS is going to be overwhelmed. That has been our measuring stick. Clearly, in the first wave, when we didn't have access to vaccines, we saw a higher number of those hospitalisations happening. We're not in that situation anymore thanks to our fantastic vaccination programme. So, we are in a situation where, thankfully, at last, our rates do seem to be coming down. We don't know what's around the corner. We know that this new variant, this AY.4.2, is probably slightly more infectious even than the delta, so we still have yet to learn to what extent that is going to spread, and we haven't seen that spread perhaps within our schools yet. We've got to see if the waning of the vaccination happens quicker than our ability to get the booster into people's arms. All of these things are factors that we will need to put in. So, it'll never be a precise figure where we determine. What we said in that 21-day review is that if cases continue to increase, then we will have to look at working our way up those levels. Hopefully we won't be in that situation, and hopefully those figures will come down.