1. Statement by the First Minister: Update on COVID-19

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:11 pm on 22 December 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:11, 22 December 2021

The model is also having to be calibrated against changing evidence in relation, for example, to a length of stay. So, it may be that people who become ill with omicron recover more quickly and therefore are in hospital for less time, and that would have an impact on the scenarios that the model sets out. So, we will publish the model, but it is even more provisional at the moment than it would have been at other parts of the coronavirus experiencing.

NHS staff modelling has been important to us, of course. Sickness in the NHS is higher this week than it was last week, as more people are falling ill from both delta and the onset of omicron that we now see in Wales. But this is not just NHS staff, as I know the leader of Plaid Cymru will know; it's staff in the care home sector. Part of the pressure in our health service is because it is more difficult this winter to discharge people to their own homes or to care homes because we don't have the staff there to be able to look after people. But it's not even just in health and social care, it's the ability of local authorities to run refuse collection services, for example. You know, all those vital things that come under pressure if we have more people unable to be in the workplace.

On furlough, the calls that we have made, alongside the First Minister of Scotland and the First and Deputy First Ministers in Northern Ireland, have not yet been answered by the UK Government. It's not so much that we would make different decisions about what we will do immediately, because we're able to cover those from our own resources, just about; it's just that if we need to go further, the playing field is not level. If English Ministers decide they need to go further, they will have the support of the Treasury to do so. If any devolved Government decides to do so, we don't have that guarantee. That is simply unfair. Every one of us ought to be able to make decisions on public health grounds alone in the same way as English Ministers are able to make for England, and we're yet to get to a position where we have that properly, as I would see it, sorted out.

If I understood the question correctly, Llywydd, the working from home rules that we are replicating now are the ones we had right at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, and the TUC was indeed at the shadow social partnership council this morning, and we will continue our dialogue with them.

For smaller gyms, the other reasonable measures that they are able to take does allow them to see whether they can open on a less than 2m social distancing basis. They would still have to have a 2m distance wherever they could, and they would have to be confident that the mitigating measures are sufficient to allow them to operate safely. But we will elevate in the advice that we will provide to the sector the fact that those mitigating measures are available to them, and I hope that that will be helpful to them in weighing up their ability to continue to provide a service. The contacts of people in a close-contact regime will be the contacts who would have been contacted by the TTP service, so that's how, I think, we define those.

In relation to higher grade masks, look, this has been a matter of considerable contention during the whole of the pandemic. It is why an expert group has been set up. It is clinically led. That group looked at all the evidence, particularly the aerosol evidence in relation to omicron, only just over a week ago. They came to the conclusion that there was no change in their advice, but they too have elevated, in the advice they have provided, the flexibility that is there in health settings to use FFP3 masks where there are particular vulnerabilities that need to be taken into account. And we have made sure that we have relayed that elevated advice to the Welsh health service.

Every time we have had a new iteration of the vaccination programme, we have followed the prioritisation advice of the JCVI. So, if there is to be a fourth booster programme, we will get the JCVI advice. It generally follows the pattern that Adam Price pointed to: it looks to see those people who had the last vaccination earliest and for whom the protection may therefore have waned the fastest, and you go back to those people first. But, if the advice was to be different to that, we would rely on that expert advice. 

And finally, Llywydd, I simply echo what the leader of Plaid Cymru said, and colleagues who have been following the advice that the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been making on behalf of the World Health Organization in this area, and he provided a further update on that only yesterday, I believe: nobody is safe until everybody is safe from this awful disease. And to quote Gordon Brown, the rich west is running the risk of playing Russian roulette with the future health of their populations by not doing everything that they could to provide vaccination right around the globe. Until we do, then the risk is that somewhere, in an at-risk population without the benefit of vaccination, another new variant is brewing today, and next time we may not be so lucky that it might be less severe or its vaccine escape might be limited. So, the case for that great global effort is not one of simple generosity, it is of enlightened self interest. We do this to protect ourselves as well as to protect those other populations. Alongside others in the United Kingdom, not just in the political world, but far beyond it, we urge the UK Government to go on providing a lead. And I want to say that they have provided a lead, some important leadership in this sphere, but we think there's more that could be done, and we'd urge them to do all of that to protect us as well as others.