The leader of Ceredigion County Council is calling for rapid testing to be available so that students going home for Christmas can be tested before coming back to the county in the new year.

The number of Covid-19 cases are dropping, with 22 new positives reported in the seven days up to 30 October.

Cllr Ellen ap Gwynn gave an update to Ceredigion council’s Cabinet on Tuesday, saying that although the current pandemic situation was unlikely to come to an end quickly “numbers are coming down in Ceredigion and long may that continue”.

At the virtual Cabinet meeting members heard that the number of cases per 100,000 was 30.3, the lowest in Wales.

Cllr ap Gwynn added that she had been calling for quicker testing to be implemented by Welsh Government, particularly to ensure that students who go home for Christmas can be tested before retuning to Ceredigion.

The council’s own track and trace team is now also focusing on the ‘K number’ which helped identify clusters of infections and looks at interactions further back to find where cases “emanated from.”

The ‘R value’ relates to how many people on average one infected person will infect, while K provides more detail on the variation behind it.

All the county’s schools had reopened after half-term with an attendance rate of 91 per cent on average, the highest figure in the country, but there were discussions ongoing with teacher unions about the possibility of an additional break before Christmas as they bear the “stress and strain”.

Care homes remained protected and no visits were allowed although requests are being made for additional funding for “pods of some sort” or Perspex screening outside to allow residents to at least see family members, added Cllr ap Gwynn.

The message from Welsh Government focused on a need for people to take responsibility for their own family’s safety and for people to “think, do I really need to do this before going on a trip or to visit somebody?”