North Wales ‘getting over the peak’ of virus after ‘significant impact’

Wrexham.com for people living in or visiting the Wrexham area

This article is old - Published: Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

The Health Minister has said North Wales appears to be getting over the peak of the virus.

A week ago the First Minister Mark Drakeford warned that a peak was possibly being reached in North Wales, and the Health Minister Vaughan Gething spoke about the data surrounding the peak identification and acknowledged that ‘confirmed cases’ was one of many indicators.

Today we asked the Health Minister for an update on the situation in North Wales.

We also asked if it would be possible to share data such as hospital admissions, numbers of people in ITU compared to capacity, and how many recoveries have taken place – as the public information is ‘confirmed cases’ based off a low number of testing incidents.

The Health Minister replied, “Yes, I’ll happily make sure we can provide some figures on where we are on hospital figures, hospital intakes, because we have got those figures by Health Board area.

“It did look like though when I last looked, that we’re seeing it is getting over the peak within North Wales, which is good news of course.

“We’re still in the position where North Wales has had a significant impact.”

“But, less so than the the three health boards in the south east corner – with Cardiff & Vale, Cwm Taf and Aneurin Bevan still the most significantly affected, in terms of not just the numbers of deaths, unfortunately taking place, but also in terms of the wider harm that has been caused on a per head basis as well.”

The Minister reiterated he would provide the extra data on ‘what the figures look like in North Wales’ allowing comparisions with other areas.

Two weeks ago we published data from an internal dashboard that was unofficially shared to us. We will publish the new official data when we receive it.

You can view the full daily briefing, along with the Q&A session on the below video: