Posted: Mon 1st Jun 2020

Contact tracing system for Wales starts today with onus on you to ‘do the right thing’ and self-isolate if asked

Wrexham.com for people living in or visiting the Wrexham area
This article is old - Published: Monday, Jun 1st, 2020

A population-wide contact tracing system is being rolled out across Wales as lockdown restrictions are eased, Health Minister Vaughan Gething has announced.

From today, anyone who has a positive coronavirus test result will be contacted by a team of contact tracers and asked for details of everyone they have had close contact with while they have had symptoms.

Close contact means anyone:

  • They have been within 1m of and had a face-to-face-conversation, had skin-to-skin contact with or have coughed on, or been in other forms of contact with for a minute or longer;
  • They have been within 2m of for more than 15 minutes
  • They have travelled in a vehicle with or sat near on public transport.

All these close contacts will be followed up and will be asked to self-isolate for 14 days as a precaution to prevent the virus spreading further.

From next Monday, 8 June, contact tracing will be supported by a new online system, which will give people the option to provide details of their close contacts electronically.

On Friday we asked the First Minister if someone gets contacted by a tracing team and told to isolate but refuses, what happens? We asked if there are there any penalties, and if so who does any enforcement and how it would be monitored.

First Minister Mark Drakeford said, “So a number of questions there, how will it be enforced and monitored? We will be doing that through our public health system and the contact tracers that we are going to employ.

“We will have daily figures of the number of people that our contact tracers are being asked to contact, we will have to rely on people’s willingness to do the right thing in Wales. That’s the basis on which we are proceeding.

“You have to have some trust in the local population, who have shown such astonishing commitment over the last 10 weeks, that they will go on with being willing to do the right thing. Because if you are being asked to self isolate, you are being asked to make your contribution to keep yourself safe and people who matter to you safe as well.

“I don’t anticipate we will reach a point where there are people wilfully acting in a way that would spread coronavirus to other people here in Wales. It’s not the sort of place we are, we don’t embark on this difficult journey together on the basis that we cannot trust one another to do the right thing.”

Health Minister Vaughan Gething said: “Today’s roll-out of the contact tracing element of our Test, Trace, Protect strategy is a significant step forward in the gradual move out of lockdown.

“Over the last few months, thanks to the help of the public and the way they have followed the stay-at-home rules, we have managed to slow the spread of the virus to the point where we can today ease the regulations to enable family and friends to meet again.

“Contact tracing is a tried and tested method of bringing outbreaks of infectious diseases under control and we hope it will do the same with coronavirus – but for it to be successful, we need everyone’s help and cooperation in sharing details about their movements and contacts. We also need people to self-isolate if they may be at risk.

“The scientific advice is clear – we need a contact tracing system in place before we begin to lift restrictions further.”

Health boards and local authorities are working together to deliver contact tracing. The system has been trialled in four health board areas over the last two weeks and more than 600 contact tracers have so far been employed. This number is likely to rise as the system is rolled out.

Testing capacity has been increased to support contact tracing and home tests and tests at the drive-through centres for both critical workers and the public can be booked online.

Full details of the contact tracing system are available at https://gov.wales/testing-coronavirus



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