Latest editorial
(ABOVE) First Minister Mark Drakeford speaking at a press conference in Cardiff ahead of Wales’ two-week lockdown that took place in October
A FIREBREAK lockdown lasting 17 days in Wales succeeded in reducing coronavirus transmission rates, First Minister Mark Drakeford said today.
The Welsh Labour leader said that the evidence was “now good enough to say that the firebreak period did succeed.”
The lockdown started on October 23 and ended on November 9.
Wales has seen 10 consecutive days of numbers coming down and positivity rates coming down, and both have fed into a “slowdown” in numbers of people being admitted to hospital with Covid-19, Mr Drakeford told the BBC.
He warned against “frittering away” the improvements, saying it now depends on people in Wales “behaving in ways that allow us to capitalise on the ground we’ve gained.”
Asked about the reproduction number, or R value, for Covid-19 in Wales, Mr Drakeford said that the aim is to get it below 0.8.
He added: “We’ll know in another week whether we succeeded in that but on the whole it’s looking promising.”
In Scotland today, 11 local authority areas entered Level Four restrictions for three weeks.
