Mark Drakeford answers questions on the end of lockdown

"In some ways, the evidence might point in the opposite direction," Mr Drakeford said when asked if the Welsh Government had reconsidered centralising NHS services and closure of A&E services like that at Withybush Hospital.

"The number of people attending A&E has been 40per cent lower than they were this time last year."

Mr Drakeford said more had been achieved in a few months than "we have achieved in several years in terms of moving [NHS] services online and to remote consultation," which he said would benefit people in more scattered and remote populations.

He admitted that part of the reason A&E attendance is down is due to resident's fears of catching the virus at hospitals, but said it was only part of the explanation.

See also: 'Thursday's Clap for Carers should be the last' organiser says

Travel constraints had led to people searching for a more online way of doing things, Mr Drakeford said, such as using 111 services and video call consultations.

Asked if the virus had highlighted a need for better integration between the Welsh NHS and social care, Mr Drakeford said the crisis had already seen greater integration, pointing to PPE as an example.

"You will know that PPE in care homes is normally the responsibility of the care home owner and operator.

"They are expected to secure a supply and pay for a supply. During this crisis, we have supplied PPE to all care homes in Wales from the NHS stock and we are paying for it as well."

See also: Kilgetty grandad beats coronavirus

Mr Drakeford added that when retired nurses have been brought back into the NHS to help with the crisis they have often been placed in care homes due to their level of experience.

"In a practical way the crisis has brought the two systems closer together and we will be thinking hard about whether there is more that we can do," he said.

Asked how the mounting costs of the virus would be paid for, Mr Drakeford admitted local authorities were facing increased expenditure and a loss of income from areas like parking charges and leisure centres but felt that Welsh council were in a better position than their English counterparts.

Mr Drakeford said £95m had come from in an initial budget from the UK government, supplemented with money from the Welsh Government's own budget, for an initial payment of £110m to local authorities.

Money from the revenue support grant - a grant used for running a council's running costs, for example, building maintenance - was also brought forward, "to make sure that local authorities don't simply run out of cash".

He hoped the Welsh Government will also be able to provide further assistance in the future for the income council's have lost.

"Beyond that, help will have to come from the UK government and the pressure is on them because while things are tough for local authorities in Wales, local authorities in England rely far more on income generating sources of funding than we do.

"We have sustained investment in local authorities in Wales far beyond what has happened across our border."

See also: Wales Air Ambulance called to serious incident

The UK government will have to step in to keep local authorities viable in England, Mr Drakeford said, and Wales will also get help as a result of the Barnett formula - the mechanism used by the UK government to decide how much is given to devolved nations.

The First Minister said he has argued for a reform of the Barnett formula because it doesn't take into account the needs of the people of Wales.

Mr Drakeford said there had been issues surrounding messaging of where England and Wales had differed, saying national newspapers based in London hadn't always appreciated the differences between the countries.

He added: "In England, you can jump in your car and go out and test your eyesight if you want to [referring to the Prime Minister's aide Dominic Cummings, who admitted doing so on Monday]. Whereas in Wales, the message is absolutely: stay home, stay safe, stay local.

"I was cheered up at the weekend by the reports of beaches in Pembrokeshire, I was told, were very empty compared with beaches in South End or Skegness.

"I think it has shown an enormous discipline of the people in Wales."

Asked if Mr Johnson keeping Dominic Cummings on after the aide was accused of breaking the rules had made keeping the message here more difficult, Mr Drakeford said he hoped not.

"Had Mr Cummings attempted such a journey in Wales he would undoubtedly have been breaking the law.

"The rules in England may be more ambiguous and that's for them.

"The rules in Wales, have I hope, been much clearer for people. In Wales certainly, there is no 'one law for some people and a different law for everyone else'.

"We're all having to make a considerable sacrifice."

Mr Drakeford denied that the Welsh Government had bent or changed the rules in a similar fashion to the UK Government's Cummings situation, when compared to Vaughan Gething, the health minister, sitting to eat chips with his son during lockdown.

"I think the things are not comparable," he said "In the Cummings case we have somebody whose family was already infectious with the virus, driving many many miles away and then apparently travelling around from the point they had arrived at.

"In Vaughan Gething's case he was in sight of his house, he was not infectious and nor was anybody else [in his household] and his five-year-old son stopped for just a few moments just to get something to eat on the way home."

Mr Drakeford said the Conservative party in Wales called "vociferously" for Mr Gething to be sacked for eating chips but had been "conspicuously silent in their views of what might have happened in the Cummings case".

While the coronavirus had been an awful experience, Mr Drakeford thought there were lessons we could learn from it, saying he had banned the phrase "back to normal".

"I don't want simply for things to go back to the way things were before when we've learned better ways of doing things."

While he didn't want to completely reject regional variations in lockdown rules, Mr Drakeford said it was not "immediately attracted to it."

Pointing to the difference in messaging across the border and the complexities of messaging that brought, Mr Drakeford said it would be even harder at a more local level.

"One of my reservations inside Wales is the complexity of the message," he said.

"And therefore the difficulties of enforcing that difference. If people in Pembrokeshire had a different set of rules when they went into Ceredigion how easy would that be to explain to people and how easy would that be for the people making sure that was being adhered to?"