Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 25 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:00, 25 January 2022

Well, Llywydd, that would not be a matter for Ministers, I think, to take such a decision without the advice they would need, and I've seen no advice directly of that sort. But I do agree with what Adam Price has said about the importance of long COVID. The Office for National Statistics figures that I think he was relying on do indeed show 58,000 people living in private households in Wales experiencing the symptoms of COVID four weeks after first contracting the disease, and in nearly a third of those, or around a third of those, people still experiencing those symptoms a year after having had the acute episode.

So, one of the reasons why I feel so frustrated when I hear primarily Conservative politicians talk glibly about living with coronavirus, as though it were some sort of trivial matter, is that we know that the more people who contract coronavirus in the community, even when it may be mild for most people, a proportion of them will end up living with long COVID, and the more people who are contracting the disease, the more people with long COVID there will be. And that is not something to be set aside as though it simply didn't count for anything.