‘The reasonable worst-case scenario suggests Christmas could be a very difficult time if everything goes against us’
ELEVEN Welsh local authorities and a town are now in a second lockdown as coronavirus cases surge across the country again.
Coronavirus laws are being further tightened in Neath Port Talbot, the Vale of Glamorgan and Torfaen from 6pm today. They join Cardiff, along with Swansea and Llanelli, which are already in lockdown.
The restrictions will be the same as those already affecting people living in Merthyr Tydfil, Bridgend, Blaenau Gwent, Newport, Rhondda Cynon Taf and Caerphilly, which are already in lockdown.
As Wales’ First Minister, Mark Drakeford makes the final decision on whether or not to limit our freedoms in the name of public health. He spoke to us as the latest lockdowns were announced.
Q: A second wave and resurgence of the virus was feared in winter, but it seems to have started earlier. Why do you think this is? Was it schools reopening? Mark Drakeford: I think it is right to say that it was earlier than expected or modelled.
There are a couple of other things we know of – people coming back from abroad with the virus is one and there is also the level of household mixing.
August bank holiday, I think, was something to do with it.
Over that bank holiday weekend, when the weather was very good, people would get together and we would see levels of household transmission beginning to take off.
I don’t think there is much evidence that schools are driving it.
Q: You are not inclined to bring back blanket shielding unless absolutely necessary and say it’s currently a judgement call for people to make themselves. You changed your living arrangements – how did you come to make that call?
MD: While the shielding rules were there I didn’t stay in my own house because of my mother-in-law and my wife, who were both shielding.
Once the letter came through from the Chief Medical Officer saying after August 16 you can use more judgement, I moved back into the house and have been there since.
Q: What would it take for schools to close?
MD: I think there are a number of ways in which that could come about. We have already seen one or two schools in Caerphilly where the number of staff who are affected meant it was quite difficult to keep the school running.
They managed to do it, but you can imagine that in more difficult circumstances some schools just wouldn’t have enough teachers to stay open.
On a more general level it would be even more elevated levels of the virus, with hospitals under some considerable strain.
The modelling is still showing that school is not a place where the virus is really circulating, but you may come to a point where even marginal additional numbers make a difference.
Q: Can you paint a picture of what could be the best and worst-case scenarios at Christmas?
MD: It’s a bit of a crystal ball situation, isn’t it? It’s not going to be completely precise, but in broad terms I think that, if things went our way, at Christmas we might be in the same position we were in up to the point the local lockdown happened.
So people would still be able to meet indoors with up to six people from their extended household plus children. People would be able to travel across Wales and not be confined to local areas.
I think that is at the better end of what we might expect. If we can manage all of that by Christmas, I think we will be doing well.
The reasonable worst-case scenario suggests Christmas could be a very difficult time if everything goes against us.
In those situations I think we would see our hospitals filling up again, we would see a lot of people who are very seriously ill, and we wouldn’t be able to meet people beyond those we live with.
Christmas would be a pretty different experience from the one we would like it to be. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
None of this is inevitable. It all depends on how we behave and how we get on top of the virus.
Q: What lessons have you taken from the first wave that have informed what you are doing now?
MD: Act early and decisively. If we had our time again and we were back in March, I think the advice might have come earlier about taking action. That is influencing our decision to take action in Cardiff.
The numbers are not yet at 50 per 100,000, but you can be pretty confident they will be in a couple of days so we are acting earlier, but we would not have done that in the first wave.
I also think some of the advice will be more calibrated.
We took that large number of people into the shielding group and we treated them all the same. I think we might have slightly more differentiated advice this time.
I don’t think we would have closed schools as early as we did last time.
In care homes we have definitely learnt some lessons. We have to be more careful about staff and travel between care homes.
We know this time that it is really large care homes that are most at risk.
Small care homes have largely escaped the virus. Once you’ve got more than 50 beds in a single establishment, that is where the virus takes hold.
Q: Are you confident the virus is not going to be able to enter care homes this time?
MD: I think we have built the wall higher. But I don’t think anybody can say the virus cannot get over the wall.
There are only three ways a virus can get into a care home – a resident brings it in, for instance when returning from hospital or being admitted for the first time. We are doing far more testing to make sure that doesn’t happen.
There is staff, and there is also visitors and this is one of the hardest things of all. Cardiff and other local authorities have had to pull back from visits to care homes. And yet we know that this comes with a very big price – particularly for people with dementia.
We are still going to be allowing visitors in exceptional circumstances and you can’t rule out the possibility that the virus might get into the care home by one of these routes.
Q: Could these lockdowns be tightened further and could we see the five-mile rule return?
MD: Yes. When we published our winter protection plan and the plan we published in August, we set out a list of things you can draw on and there are things beyond what we are doing now.
It would be a return to a stricter five-mile “stay local” type of intervention.
We could close non-essential retail again, but we are not doing that at the moment. We could have more restrictions on hospitality than we have introduced. At the very far end of the spectrum, schools could come into play. There is quite a long list of things that we haven’t done which we could do. The point of trying to act early is to try and avoid the need to do this.
Q: If I am a student in Year 11 or Year 13, what are my exams going to look like this year?
MD: If you are in that position, you should be looking out for the results of the group we have put together to give advice on this. Concentrate on your coursework because that could count for more than it does in other circumstances.
Think carefully about [mock exams] because they might count towards your final result if it’s not possible to run conventional exams again.
We plan in this scenario to draw on a wider range of evidence of a young person’s performance and ability over the year than we were able to in the circumstances last year.
Our aim is to get back to the way people used to have their work assessed for exams and coursework, but things move so fast I don’t think you could guarantee it.
Q: Many people are seeing the end of winter as the end-point for the crisis. Is that realistic? Is this all vaccine-dependent?
MD: There are three things which could avoid us being in exactly the same position next spring and summer.
First is treatments. They are getting better, and new treatments are becoming available. They are not vaccines, they don’t prevent it, but they increase the chance of you being successfully treated.
Secondly, there may be a breakthrough on mass testing. Again, it is not a vaccine, but it would be
First Minister Mark Drakeford
quicker and easier for people to know if they’ve got the virus.
Third is vaccines. I worry that when people hear the word “vaccine” they think of what they are used to, where you take it once and you have protection for life.
The vaccines that will come first will not be like that. They will give you some protection for some time, but they may only last weeks. They won’t give you 100% protection, though they may give you more protection. The early vaccines are not a magic wand to get us to where we were before.
But with those three things in combination, I think we can have some optimism that though coronavirus will still be here, it won’t be having the same effect.
Q: Should people who have booked tickets to concerts and gigs in the summer be hopeful they will be able to attend?
MD: Yes. They shouldn’t be without hope. We have all managed without doing things for a year, but the idea you won’t be able to do it next year is pretty daunting, isn’t it?
Q: Does Wales need to take testing into our own hands? Surely we can’t go into the winter in a position where we need to ring Matt Hancock to ask what is going on with our tests?
MD: I have just come from a meeting where we have been looking at the latest figures. From memory, we are doing around 4,500 tests a day from Lighthouse Labs this last week. We expect that to be 14,000 a day by the beginning of November.
Obviously I asked our officials how confident they are that these figures are realistic and reliable and what they have said is that if things stay on track, we will be getting 10,000 tests more a day from the
Lighthouse Labs in November than we do now. You have to have some confidence that these plans are real and they will work. In the meantime we have been doing between 2,500 and 3,000 tests a day in the Welsh system. That will be up to 5,000 tests a day next week.
Depending upon a machine which is in Wales, which needs to be installed and then has to be tested, we will then be up to 8,000.
Q: We hear that Wales has enough capacity for 15,000 tests a day. Can we really hit that?
MD: 15,000 is the maximum we could do in a day and if we piled everything into it we would get to that number. But it is not sustainable to do that because you would have used up a lot of stuff, and people need time off, machines break down and reagents need to be reordered.
Q: What are you considering for the next three-week review?
MD: It will not be like the three-week reviews we got used to in July and August, where every three weeks I would be able to say that we are lifting restrictions in this area and in that area.
There will be a small number of issues that we will attend to and some of those will be in enforcement.
I’m not saying this will definitely happen but at the moment local authorities have powers to stop people congregating outside and drinking. The question that is being asked is, would it be better if we had a national policy where it was the same everywhere?
I have asked for us to look at the Scottish household model. In the lockdown areas, you can only meet people from your extended household [in Scotland, an extended household can be formed by a person who lives alone or only with children under 18 with another household of any size].
In Scotland, if you are a single person living on your own you can form an extended household with one other. I am concerned about those elderly people living on their own who, at the moment, are not able to mix with anybody else indoors.
Part of this three-week review will be to see whether we can move to the Scottish model. If these lockdowns are only going to last a matter of weeks maybe it isn’t quite as bad, but if it’s going to go on week after week we need to think about those single-person households.
Q: What are your views on the new scheme to protect jobs announced by the Chancellor?
MD: When the UK Government has acted to support jobs in the economy through the furlough scheme, I have always wanted to recognise that. It is very important in Wales and it is part of the benefit we get from being part of the United Kingdom.
We have been communicating that the furlough scheme should not come to an abrupt end. We need something beyond it. The announcement yesterday was good news in that way.
The slightly less good news for us is that there’s to be no autumn budget.
The Welsh Government has no budget at all after the end of March next year.
We are halfway through this financial year and we don’t know at all the money we will have next year and that makes it very difficult to make decisions for the health service, for local government and third sector organisations.
So it’s good on the one hand, difficult on the other.