THE latest covid-19 figures are not available today due to 'essential upgrades' to the NHS Welsh Laboratory Information Management System (WLIMS), it has been said.

In addition to the maintenance, which took place on Friday, Public Health Wales is making some changes to the way it publishes covid information on our website and data dashboard.

A spokesman said: "There will be a period of data reconciliation and validation that will affect our daily reporting figures for several days after this downtime.

"From Monday, December 14, we will be bringing forward the publication time for our data dashboard and our daily statement from 2pm to the earlier time of 12pm.

"For operational reasons, we will be changing the daily ‘data correct as of’ from 1pm the previous day to 9am the previous day.

"We also plan to extend the lag period for seven day case rate reporting from two to four days.

"This will further improve the accuracy of Coronavirus cases per 100,000 population by local authority area for the most recent seven day incidence."

Dr Robin Howe, Incident Director for the Coronavirus Response at Public Health Wales, said: “These changes to publication arrangements are part of our approach to continuing improvement of the accuracy of our dashboard.

“We remind people that our dashboard is intended as a rapid reporting tool to provide the best and most up-to-date information, which is subject to ongoing data reconciliation.

"Official statistics relating to Coronavirus in Wales are published by the Office for National Statistics."