Coronavirus: Wales has ‘path to Christmas’ as it comes out of its firebreak restrictions, says first minister

Wales’s first minister Mark Drakeford has said he believes the principality has “a path through to Christmas” without further lockdowns after it emerges from its 17-day firebreak restrictions on Monday.

Mr Drakeford defended his decision to press ahead with lifting the firebreak at a time when coronavirus cases are increasing in 14 out of 22 Welsh council areas and Merthyr Tydfil has the highest infection rate in the whole UK.

He said it was always “inevitable” that Covid-19 cases would rise during the period of tight social and economic restrictions in Wales, because of the time lag between infection and symptoms becoming apparent.

And he said he was still asking residents of Wales to avoid travelling if they could - and said they were anyway banned from crossing the border into England because of the national lockdown introduced there on Thursday.

Mr Drakeford told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “We were absolutely certain that we would see those numbers continue to rise during the firebreak period itself.

“It is only in the couple of weeks after 9 November that we will see the impact of the firebreak. That is when we hope to see numbers declining, that is when we expect the number of people going into our hospitals to begin to go into reverse.”

Mr Drakeford said he was hoping for a meeting of devolved administration leaders with the UK government by the end of the week to agree a “four-nation approach to Christmas”.

“So many families in Wales have their friends and other family members in other parts of the United Kingdom and vice versa,” he said.

“We were promised last week by Michael Gove, the minister in charge of the Cabinet Office, that we will have another four-nation meeting in this coming week so that we can pool ideas, plan together, have a common approach to the Christmas period.

“I really hope that meeting materialises, because it is only by getting around the table and sharing the position each one of us faces, the challenges we have, the common solutions that we can craft, that we can get to where I want us to be and that is a single approach right across the United Kingdom for everyone over the Christmas period.”

During the “short, sharp” firebreak period, people in Wales  were told to stay at home, except for very limited purposes and avoid meeting other households.

Secondary schools were restricted to online learning and bars, restaurants and most shops had to close.

Wales on Saturday reported 958 new cases of Covid-19, compared to 762 at the start of the firebreak on 23 October.