What is a circuit-breaker could one fight the virus?
A circuit-breaker is a tight set of restrictions designed to reverse the tide of the epidemic and bring the number of cases down.Get more news about
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The rules could feel a lot like the original national lockdown - but crucially a circuit-breaker is for a fixed period of time.The hope is they are less damaging - to the economy and people's mental health - than a longer lockdown, because people can plan ahead more easily.
How far Covid rates drop would depend on how severe the restrictions were, and how much we stick to them.Dr Adam Kucharski, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "The overarching aim is you don't want intensive care units filling up again, but you also have increased options at lower levels of the virus."
The government's test-and-trace programme is currently only reaching half of infected people's close contacts in some areas, the BBC has learned.
Dr Kucharski said: "As cases and hospitalisations increase, there is less information on what the outbreak is doing, as test and trace can't pick it all up, you don't know where the outbreak is."Anything shorter and the risk is people who are infected just before the start of the circuit-breaker may still be able to spread the virus when it ends.
The longer the circuit-breaker, the more it would reduce cases - but the greater the other impacts on society.It can take a week between being infected and developing symptoms, the same again between getting sick and needing hospital treatment, and up to a month before people die.
All of these lags mean the statistics on deaths and hospital admissions are expected to look worse throughout the whole of a circuit-breaker.First Minister Mark Drakeford said the chief medical officer's analysis was the evidence was now "good enough" to show it did "succeed".
He said the number of Covid patients in hospital was "stabilising" and the R number - the number of people someone infects - in Wales the following week "could have been below one".
After Wales' firebreak ended, restaurants, pubs, gyms all reopened and infection rates generally fell the following week in most places.
