First Minister: “Early stages of moving out of lockdown will not look very different to lockdown itself”

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This article is old - Published: Monday, May 4th, 2020

“The numbers are decreasing, our reproduction rate and the rate at which coronavirus is spreading has come down,” The First Minister has said.

Speaking at this afternoon’s press conference Mr Drakeford noted that the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus reported every day by Public Health Wales are now consistently less than 200.

A total of 1,505 tests were also carried out yesterday.

The First Minister said: “The number of people in hospital with coronavirus has fallen from more than 1300 on the 23rd of April, to just over 1000 yesterday. There are now fewer than 100 people in critical care beds in Wales with coronavirus, down from more than 160 in the middle of April.

“About a quarter of people in critical care are being treated for coronavirus, and that is down from a peak of more than 40%.

“All of this this body of evidence taken together shows that everything we are doing as a community has helped us to move past this peak of the virus, the level of compliance across all parts of our community has had the desired effect.

“Nevertheless, the Public Health Wales daily figures of deaths from coronavirus in Wales, are approaching 1000, and the ONS official figures which count all deaths have already exceeded this sombre milestone. As I say every time I come to this podium. These are more than just numbers, each one of those is a life lost. Behind every number is a person, and a family grieving the loss of a loved one.”

The First Minister was asked about reports today of UK Government draft plans on how slow emerging from lockdown could occur, and the now usual question of what that could look like.

The First Minister said, “What I’ve seen of the documents of the UK circulated over the weekend I think the limitation is not that they would cause active harm to people’s health, but they are pitched very generally. What we will have to do in Wales is to translate the general advice they give into much more specific action in different workplaces, because workplaces vary enormously.

“What you need to be able to do to make one workplace safe will not be identical to what will be needed in a different sorts of setting. That’s why we’ve been working on this over the last 10 days or more involving trade unions, involving employer associations, and very good help for example, from organisations like the Wales Automotive Forum

“That is about customising the general advice so that it works in the specifics of a workplace. Now, social distancing will be part of that, but there are many other measures that employers will want to think about. One thing to think about is places where people gather in the workplace, canteens for example, and how you would use those in future.

“They will be wanting to think about hours of work, do you extend the hours of work so there are fewer people there at any one time? Do you have different shift patterns, so you’d have fewer people in the building? What can you learn from the experience of the last six weeks where we know that lots of people are successfully able to work at home for much longer periods than was the case before? There’s a wide repertoire of ideas that can be drawn on, what then has to happen is that those ideas have to be applied, and there needs to be a plan, and each employer will be required to publish a risk assessment that shows how they translated the general advice into things that give their workers confidence that this is a safe place to which you can return.”

Speaking more generally about the possible loosening of lockdown he said, “I don’t want to offer people false optimism about how quickly people will begin to see a difference.”

“My view has long now been that early stages of moving out of lockdown will not look very different to lockdown itself. But those first measures need to be careful. They need to be cautious, and they need to be capable of being monitored carefully as well, to make sure that if there are any unintended consequences we can deal with them quickly.”

You can view the full briefing from today, including the Q&A session below: