Diolch yn fawr, Russell, and a happy new year to you, and it's good to see everybody back, although obviously we all hope to be together in the Chamber once we're out of this particular wave. We're all hoping that this year is going to be better than last year and certainly we're hoping that we'll see an end to this particular wave very, very shortly.

I was also struck by the statements, both in the SAGE report and in our own TAC report, that suggested that shopping, actually, was responsible for quite a lot of the spread of the virus. I think the difference in terms of the restrictions we've got in place that demand, for example, that people need to show a COVID pass to go into cinemas compared to shopping is that you don't have to go to a cinema, whereas, actually, it's very difficult to live without food, and you do need to go shopping for that. So, that's the significant difference in terms of why we've brought in measures in some places rather than in others.

We're obviously keen to see what measures we can put in place to make sure that the booster is also acknowledged on the COVID pass, if we're going to use that in future as a measure. What we do know is that the booster gives protection to people and has stopped significant numbers from going into hospital, as those reports have suggested. Of course, it is commonplace on the continent for people to be using these COVID passes and, of course, it has also been introduced in England now in some settings. So, I'm glad to see England following the lead of Wales once again.

In relation to the NHS, you've heard that about 8 per cent of NHS staff are self-isolating. I need to make it absolutely clear: we are not at the end of this COVID crisis yet. We are in a situation where we are getting to the top of the wave, so it does shock me rather that we keep on talking about what the future's going to look like. We are in the middle of the storm at the moment; now is not the time to talk about dismantling the protection measures we've put in place.

Having said that, we have to recognise that the number of people contracting the virus at the moment is having a huge impact on our ability to ensure that those public services are maintained, which is why we listened to the advice, and it was listening to specialist advice that suggested that we could reduce the self-isolation time from 10 to seven with a negative PCR on days 6 and 7. But, certainly, the advice that I've seen hitherto from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that it would be counter-productive to reduce further than seven days because, actually, you could be sending people back into the workplace and spreading the virus further. So, that was certainly their advice in the past; if they change their minds, then obviously we will need to look at that advice. So, we will be clinically led on this decision. I think it's worth noting that in the States, for example, where the requirement to self-isolate is for five days, that they start from a different point. So, they start from when they see the onset of symptoms, whereas we start at the point of testing, and there is a significant difference there. So, we just need to understand that.

You talk about the NHS in England using private hospitals to help clear the backlog; we're doing that as well here in Wales, Russell, so that is already happening in most health boards already. The issue at the moment is that actually there's not much capacity left in those private hospitals either. So, even if we wanted to go further down that route, it would be very difficult to find the capacity because they're the same people doing these jobs very often—people who work in the NHS sometimes work in the private sector as well. Our choice would always be to try and see that priority be given to the NHS. We've invested £0.25 billion to try and help clear the backlog. What I'd like to see is that money being invested so that we've got something permanent and long-term afterwards to put in place and to use for the future, and that's why I too am very much in favour of surgical hub centres if possible, and I've made it clear to health boards in Wales that when they come up with their proposals and their plans that I'm expecting to see some regional solutions in their recommendations. So, I'll be looking at those very carefully.

We are keeping restrictions under review constantly, of course. That's why we've gone to a weekly review at the moment, and of course we're all very keen to see life return to some kind of normality. I think now is not the time, Russ, to set out when that is going to happen because we are genuinely in the eye of the storm at the moment, but of course we're all desperate to get out of the situation and to relax those restrictions as soon as we possibly can.