Wales' First Minister Mark Drakeford has said his darkest day of the pandemic saw discussions about what would happen if so many people died, they would be unable to be buried. He said that, as well as running out of ventilators, was not a "remote" but a "real possibility".
He described his "darkest hour" in the pandemic in April 2020 : "It's a very particular day and was in the first half of April. I'm trying to work from home because that's what we're asking everybody to do. The weather was beautiful at that time of the year, you know, the sun was shining and it was a spring like day outside. And I find myself in a series of conversations that day about how we would cope if the worst were to happen.
"So it's not that the worst is happening, but it's still could. What would we do if we ran out of ventilators in Wales because at this point we don't have a vaccine, we don't have any preventative treatments and people are falling ill with it, or having very severe breathing problems. The Prime Minister did himself and you know, we know he ended up in intensive care because of exactly that impact and we're relying on ventilators and you can't make them quickly. The question is what advice will we give to a clinician on the front line if you know, if you're there, and there are more patients needing a ventilator than you have ventilators.
Read more: Everything we know about the spread of Covid in Wales
"On the same day, [we got] advice about how we would manage if so many people are dying from coronavirus we don't have places to keep people in respectful decent conditions while waiting for burial. I remember thinking the contrast between the world outside the door where the sun is shining and spring is happening and the bleakness of those conversations. Now luckily, those things didn't happen. We never did run out of ventilators, we never weren't able to offer people and families of people who didn't survive the virus the decent burial that you'd want to see for them. But at that moment those were not remote possibilities, they were real possibilities and you couldn't just put them to one side and say well we worry about that when it happens because it might have happened, next week."
Mr Drakeford has given an interview as part of a new podcast series, Unlocked: COVID Stories from Wales, which has a total of 10 episodes, five in English and five in Welsh. He explains that it was in January when the cabinet were first told about Covid by Wales' chief medical officer and how, having been concerned about what they had heard, that afternoon he and others met again to discuss it. "I think it was clear from there on that we had to think very seriously about how we would respond when this made its way across Europe and into the United Kingdom." You can see the latest travel rules for the UK's top destinations here.
He admitted he too became "fed up". "Everybody wants their life to be back on track," he said. "But actually every time we've asked, you have seen that huge collective sense that I still think we have in Wales, are lucky enough to have in Wales, that when you ask people to do something, their first thought is not for themselves. Their first thought is, 'Well, if I do this, this will help somebody else, there's somebody worse off than me and if I do what I can do, then their lives will be easier'. And we are astonishingly lucky still to have that as the sort of instinctive reaction that you see from people in Wales."
Asked his message for people going forward, he said: "Wales is living safely with Covid and that word safely really does matter because if we're not prepared to go on doing the things that we've learned to do that keep one another safe, then Covid isn't over. There may be more twists and turns in this story yet. Just a few months ago, we hadn't heard of all Omicron and in three weeks, it went from being something we'd heard of for the first time to something that was sweeping across Wales, and we can't be confident that we won't face some other twists and turns. "
The series, COVID Unlocked: Stories from Wales, also features Louis Rees-Zammit, Sophie Evans, Ellis Lloyd Jones, and Dr Bnar Talabani as it looks at how the pandemic has affected individuals across Wales.
You can listen to the full series on Spotify now: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3iJDJQh4bl0dhkgraBIxSD and https://open.spotify.com/show/12e0Yyz2n1YrgmvZ5TweK2.
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