WALES’ LOCKDOWN EXIT STRATEGY:
WALES’ plan to exit the coronavirus lockdown has been announced by First Minister Mark Drakeford.
The 20-page document, published yesterday, has been described as a “traffic light roadmap”, and details what restrictions will be eased through three stages – red, amber and green.
Each of the stages will see a “cautious” lifting of measures which apply to schools, businesses and general freedoms, which Mr Drakeford said “puts people’s health first” and “isn’t just about getting people back to work”.
But unlike in England, the Welsh Government has decided not to give any dates for when the country could expect any of the changes.
The plan was unveiled as the number of people who have died after contracting coronavirus in Wales reached 1,173, with nine more fatalities announced yesterday.
The number of positive cases of Covid-19 reported by Public Health Wales (PHW) rose by 126 to 11,960.
And officials revealed the number of tests carried out on Thursday was 1,421, with the overall total since the outbreak began standing at 54,584.
Mr Drakeford said the plan, titled Unlocking our society and economy: continuing the conversation, would show how to “unlock the framework of our society and economy”, allowing people to see friends and family, return to work, unrestricted shopping and the reopening of public services.
Yesterday, he told the Welsh Government’s daily coronavirus briefing: “It is based on the latest scientific advice.
“We will act carefully and cautiously in partnership with people in a way that is right for Wales, and we will put people’s health first.”
Mr Drakeford said no dates have been given for the changes as they will be made according to “scientific and medical advice”, but insisted his plan did show how Wales was moving “cautiously and carefully” into the first red zone step.
Under current lockdown rules people in Wales have to stay at home and maintain contact only within households, with limited exceptions.
If the virus remains under control, the amber zone would follow and include allowing priority groups of pupils to return to school, taking exercise in a small group, and the reopening of museums, galleries and other events, including weddings.
Further control of the virus would move the country into the green zone, allowing all education to resume, socialising in small groups, unrestricted travel, the return of sports events with limited capacity, and reopening of all workplaces with physical distancing, including restaurants and pubs.
Explaining the reasoning behind the lack of timescales in the plan, the First Minister said: “We have avoided dates ... because we thought the danger was that if you provide dates, people focus exclusively on the date.
“They don’t focus on what we have set out in the document which is the process we need to go through in order to know whether we have reached the right moment to make further changes.
That is much more important that an arbitrary date.”
Mr Drakeford, who also criticised the UK Government for a lack of communication over lockdown, added it was more important to focus on the “R rate” – the average number of people a sick person could pass the virus on to.
“It is being sure that we can say that the circulation of the virus is still below that R figure, that we still have capacity our health service to deal with coronavirus if it were to start to circulate again,” he said.
“Those tests are what we need to be focusing on rather than a date that you can take out of the air, put on a piece of paper and which is inevitably I think at this point arbirarty.”
He added it leads to people focusing on “the wrong thing rather than the important thing”.
The First Minister pointed out although many countries have given specific time scales of easing lockdown, many others had not.
He said: “Across the world there are some countries that have chosen to set out a date driven road map to [tackle] coronavirus and there are others; New Zealand, Australia and the Northern Ireland executive earlier this week and now Wales that prefers to set out a sequence, a pathway that people can follow and I have done it for the reasons we said.”
Mr Drakeford said it was possible different areas of life could be in different stages of the traffic light system at certain times, and admitted the new system was “more complex” than the previous stay-at-home message.
He said: “That is the simple fact of life, that there will be some settings where it will be easier to put into place those measures that can keep people safe.”
He added: “I understand it would be ‘traffic light’ plan revealed to lead wales from lockdown
simpler to say everything will move along together in a uniform way, but the reality is more complicated than that, the world is more complicated than that.”
Mr Drakeford said in terms of where measures could be eased firsts “we have already learned quite a lot in the retail sector”, particularly from supermarkets.
“It’s unavoidable that it’s going to take longer for anything that approaches a mass gathering. Groups of people being under the same roof or doing things in close proximity is not going to be in the early stages at all. It will be much further down the line.
“There will be different aspects of our plan able to be released at different points.”
The First Minister said he was hopeful there would be “more things we will be able to do in the red zone at the end of the current three weeks” of lockdown, which runs for another fortnight.
“We are hopeful of more modest moves at the end of the next two weeks,” he added. But the Senedd’s Conservative group leader, Paul Davies, described the plan as a “a roadmap to a cul-de-sac” , adding: “We need to begin to unlock society but Mark Drakeford seems to have lost his key.”
And Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said the exit strategy was “thin on detail”, saying Wales should adopt the New Zealand model of driving down the disease’s reproduction value (R number) to eradicate new cases rather than managing them.
Ian Price, director of business leaders’ group CBI Wales, was disappointed the plans did not have any concrete dates for when lockdown would start to be lifted.
He said “indicative timelines outlining when sectors and workplaces can come back online” were needed “so businesses of all shapes and sizes can quickly rampup essential restart planning and decision-making”.