The Welsh Government has just made an announcement that changes everything about how we deal with Covid in Wales.
The sweeping changes to testing in Wales throw the established Covid control practices we have all become accustomed to over the last two years out the window. Though seemingly innocuous in part, there are some consequences are far reaching and may cause real concern to people who have taken great efforts to protect themselves for the past two years.
WalesOnline has gone through the changes announced on Monday, March 28 to assess what this means for you, your family, and Wales as a whole as we head into the next phase of the virus.
Read more: Mark Drakeford comes as close as he ever has to saying there will be no more lockdowns
What was the announcement?
Wednesday, March 30, is the last day the public will be able to book a PCR test if they have symptoms
From Thursday, March 31, all PCR testing sites in Wales will close and free lateral flow tests to support regular asymptomatic testing in workplaces will end except for health and social care workers.
Free lateral flow tests for the public for regular asymptomatic testing will end on Thursday, March 31
From Friday, April 1, if you have Covid symptoms you should use a lateral flow test to check whether you have Covid and from that date, only people eligible for COVID-19 treatments will be able to order PCR tests to be done at home.
Routine asymptomatic testing in childcare and education settings, except special education provision, will stop on Friday, April 8
What are the hidden consequences of these changes to Covid?
The end of regular, routine testing
Plain and simple, the new Welsh Government guidance means that you can not get a PCR or free lateral flow test unless you have Covid symptoms. This means, for all intents and purposes, widespread testing is over in Wales.
Many of us have been taking tests before we go to see elderly, vulnerable relatives or before we go to work. The First Minister called this 'flow before you go'. Yet people will no longer be able to ask for free tests to do this. Unless an employer pays, or someone buys their own test, there will be no tests for people without symptoms.
It's hard to know exactly how many cases this has identified. But it's likely to be in the tens of thousands. Currently LFTs are only meant to be taken by people without symptoms. The latest data from Public Health Wales suggests that 239,482 test results were reported in Wales that week (many more are likely to have been used but reported) And of those 30,712 were positive. Only one test result per person is included in the data from PHW so this does not include multiple tests for one person.
Under this new guidance, all of these asymptomatic positive cases would have been missed unless people were willing to pay for their own LFTs. That is a huge amount of people unknowingly walking around spreading the virus, with no way to know that they actually have it.
No more (or very little) being pinged and told to take a test
And think through the consequences of it. All of those 30,712 cases will have had contacts who may well have been pinged and told to take a test. Given many of those cases will simply never be identified now, that means far fewer people will be get messages asking them to take a test to see if they've been infected.
You'll never find out if that sniffle was Covid (unless you pay)
Many people recently have been reporting a far wider range of Covid symptoms than were initially seen. Instead of a cough, temperature and loss of taste or smell, people are finding they have Covid but none of those symptoms. Instead they may just have a runny nose, a headache and a loss of energy.
All of those could be symptoms of a cold or flu or RSV or another virus. From now on, we'll just never know whether it was Covid unless we pay for a test.
Very few people self isolating
In its most basic terms, from now on in Wales, if you have Covid and have no symptoms, you can’t isolate unless you want to, because there is no way to know if you have the disease. Many of the people self isolating right now might never have found out they had the virus under the new regime.
That has consequences for all the people who have been shielding themselves for now as shops and other venues will become much more potentially risky places.
How can you protect your vulnerable relative now?
Thanks to vaccines and the omicron variant, far fewer people are now dying of Covid. However this doesn’t mean there aren’t still people in society who are immensely vulnerable to the disease.
One of the key ways of protecting them has been for close relatives and friends to take lateral flow tests to make sure they are not asymptomatic. That is no longer something the government will pay to help us do. Instead people will have to pay.
Tests retail around £2 each online. If you are a carer visiting your nan everyday then this could be £60 a month to your outgoings. This has the potential to mean that poorer vulnerable people will be less safe.
We just won't know how much Covid is spreading and where
Everyday since spring 2020, WalesOnline has published the daily case figures for the whole of Wales. This has included a breakdown of the infection rate in every Welsh local authority. That data is completely redundant now as a way of measuring the extent of the virus.
On a weekly basis we would publish the areas where Covid was growing fastest and the places with the highest rate right down to individual council wards. That data now simply won't exist.
With no routine testing, in many ways we are back to the stage we were at in March 2020 when the Welsh Government was scrambling for tests and almost no one was able to get one. Of course there are massive differences in the form of vaccines etc but the fact is that we now no longer have a true picture of what is happening with the virus in Wales.
There will be some monitoring. For now, the Office for National Statistics is continuing with its infection survey. That does have weekly data for Wales but it is limited. There is no local breakdown and it is much slower to update. The Welsh Government also still has the ability to monitor waste water (for now). But hospitalisations will now become the clearest indicator of whether Wales has a Covid problem. And we know from previous waves that by the time people start turning up in hospital, the horse has already long bolted in terms of real containment measures.
Variant surveillance will be very limited
First it was the Kent (now Alpha variant), then the Indian (now Delta) variant. Since then we've had Omicron and BA.2. Our lives and headlines have been full of the different variants and the effect they were having on our lives.
With far less PCR testing being done, there will only be far more limited ability for public health teams to understand the changes to Covid that are happening in the community. There will still be genomic surveillance of cases that come into hospitals but it will be at a fraction of the scale currently happening and much slower to respond.
