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Wales will begin to take its “cautious first steps” to relax its blockade of the coronavirus, the prime minister told Sky News.
Mark Drakeford will formally set out his plans at a press conference this afternoon.
More than 1,100 people have died after testing positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in Wales.
Mark Drakeford said his government will not provide dates for possible future action.
But speaking before his speech to the nation, he said that schools will not reopen early next month, as might be the case in England, although some students may return before the end of the summer period.
Drakeford said he doesn’t see bars opening “any time soon,” stressing that the government’s advice remains for people to stay home.
Scotland and Northern Ireland also stick to this mantra, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson has taken a different approach.
As closure measures begin to relax more widely in England, the Prime Minister urges people to “stay alert”, and those who cannot work from home are now encouraged to return to work.
The prime minister said Wales will adopt a traffic light system to ease the restrictions.
In the “red zone,” there will be “some additional little things that people will be able to do,” he told Sky News.
“It won’t look much different, blocking, but it will be the first cautious steps,” Drakeford continued.
“We will be monitoring these very carefully, to make sure they are not causing the coronavirus to start spreading again in Wales.”
“If we succeed, we will move to the amber zone. In the amber zone, there will be much more that people will be able to do.”
“Once again, we will track it very carefully and monitor it for a while.
“If that succeeds, we will be in the green zone and life will start to look alike long before the coronavirus started, but not completely.”
The prime minister said he only had “a very small amount of margin to start the process of unlocking our economy and our society” at this stage.
He told Sky News that the rate of R, how many people on average an infected person infects, in Wales is around 0.8.
And he warned: “Even with the R rate at 0.8, we believe that 800 people could die in Wales in the next three months from the coronavirus.
“If that number increased only a small number of decimal points to 1.1, that 800 figure would rise to 7,200.
“We have small margins to play.
“But those small margins are really the difference between life and death for thousands of Welsh citizens.”
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Welsh Labor leader Drakeford said that unlike Boris Johnson’s government in Westminster, his government would not provide dates for possible future action.
“We debated a lot about whether it was sensible to provide dates and times. In the end, like the Northern Ireland government earlier this week, we decided not to.”
“Because in a way, once you provide a date, people become obsessed with a date rather than the process you have to go through to make sure it’s safe to take those steps.”
“It’s a sequence, it’s a gradual approach, it will give people in Wales a strong sense of what to expect, but not by linking it to specific dates that somehow give it a slightly spurious sense of certainty.”
