Wales' Covid restrictions stopped almost 70,000 people getting the disease, according to the Welsh Government.
Wales' health minister Eluned Morgan told Senedd members that estimated figures showed that around 170,000 people in Wales had Covid in early January – enough to fill the Principality Stadium two-and-a-half times over.
"Had we not brought in restrictions we'd have had an extra 69,000 people with Covid. So that's enough to almost fill the Millennium Stadium [sic] again," she said.
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We asked the Welsh Government for the figures behind her comments and were told they were illustrative figures based on the ONS infection survey for the week ending January 6.
Based on those figures in the week ending January 6 just under 170,000 people in Wales had coronavirus. If Wales had the same positivity rates then as England did there would have been an extra 40,000 people with it and if Wales had the same positivity rates as in London it would have been 69,000 people with Covid.
The stadium's capacity is 74,500.
During questions from the Conservative MS Russell George, Mrs Morgan replied: "It was very interesting of you to ask about lifting restrictions and why aren't we lifting them earlier.
"Well the reason is because we're still at really high rates. Now they're much better than they were a week ago but we're still at 572 cases per 100,000. Now if we were in that situation in the middle of August last year we'd have been throwing our hands up in the air saying: 'My God, these are high rates'.
"So we've just got to just be aware that we're not out of the woods on this yet. These are really, really high rates still.
"As to asking did we overreact, I've got to tell you that our initial analysis, and it is very much initial analysis, does suggest that, although about 170,000 people in Wales had Covid at one point – that's enough people to fill the Millennium Stadium about two and a quarter times –had we not brought in restrictions we'd have had an extra 69,000 people with Covid.
"So that's enough to almost fill the Millennium Stadium again, had we followed what happened in London with them reaching the kind of rates that they got to where they didn't put any restrictions in place.
"That's our initial analysis. I'm hoping that we'll be able to do a bit more number-crunching around that and, obviously, it is appropriate for us to analyse after the event.
"We're all learning here. This is a new variant – nobody had heard of Omicron only a month and a half ago and so, what we were doing, we were depending on modelling that was using imperfect data to address and to determine what that modelling looked like. So we did peak earlier than expected, we didn't see as many hospitalisations as we had feared, so some of that modelling, perhaps, wasn't where we thought it might be, but in a good way, but also what that means is that, actually, had we followed some of the judgements that people were asking us to consider, which were to lock down even further, that may have been an overreaction but I think we got it just about right and obviously time will tell if we got it just about right."
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