Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:58 pm on 14 December 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:58, 14 December 2021

Well, I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for that, because that’s a really important point. At the most difficult part of this spectrum, we could see largely elevated numbers of people needing help from health and social care services meeting a service where there are fewer people available to provide the help that is needed, because those members of staff will be exposed to the impact of the omicron variant alongside everybody else. Now, the good news is that, in those populations, we already have very high coverage with the booster vaccine. So, that will protect that workforce. But if we see a very large wave, affecting very large numbers of people, then people who work in our health and social care system will be swept up in it as well. Even today, 11 per cent of our GP workforce are not in work because of the delta variant of coronavirus. So, if you extrapolate that and imagine the impact of an omicron wave of the sort that Chris Whitty will have been describing to the UK Cabinet, then you can see that the impact is potentially very significant. Now, all of that is being modelled through the work that we do with Swansea University and with our local health boards, and action is being taken—as I say, particularly by prioritising those staff for the booster campaign—to protect as many of those people as possible. Some changes to the self-isolation requirements to see whether people can be safely back in the workplace again as quickly as possible will also be part of that whole consideration. But, every single one of us can do things to protect ourselves, and by protecting ourselves we protect other people, and that includes the people we will be relying upon to see us through if the wave of omicron hits us as some of the models suggest it might.