FIRST Minister Mark Drakeford has insisted that the "fire-break" lockdown in Wales will end on November 9 and is deliberately designed to be "short but very sharp".

He told BBC Breakfast that the effects of the lockdown, which begins at 6pm on Friday, will not be seen within the two-week period but after it.

He said the Welsh Government will use metrics such as the number of people testing positive for COVID-19 each day, the positivity rate, and the number of people being admitted to hospital to establish how successful it has been.

"We have a series of things that we will test to see the impact of this fortnight of significant closure of people's personal and business lives in Wales in order to make sure that we are able to move into the rest of the autumn and the winter in a position where our NHS is not threatened with being overwhelmed," Mr Drakeford said.

The minister said the gap between low and high incidence areas of Wales has been "narrowing" over the past 10 days.

He told BBC Breakfast: "I'm afraid if we don't take action, it's only a matter of time before even Ceredigion begins to feel the impact of the rising tide.

"In places like Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, they are rural areas of Wales. Their hospitals are small. Even a modest rise in coronavirus cases in those parts of Wales will put the health service under real pressure.

"Other parts of Wales have worked very hard to help protect those parts of Wales where the virus has continued to be suppressed.

"This is the moment when we need a genuine national effort, all areas of Wales, all citizens of Wales, as part of one great national endeavour."

The First Minister says Welsh Government decided to go for the "shortest possible" lockdown partly to reduce the impact on people's mental health.

"It is a very difficult time indeed and it's why, in the end, we decided to go for the shortest possible period of a fire-break - a two-week period," he told BBC Breakfast.

"But if you're doing it short, you've got to do it deep. There's a trade-off there.

"We could have gone for a longer period with slightly fewer restrictions but, in the end, the advice to us - partly because of the impact on people's mental health - was that if you could keep this period of time as short as you could, that would help to mitigate that impact."

Under the "fire-break" lockdown, single adult households are able to form an alliance with one other household to address the feelings of "loneliness and isolation", Mr Drakeford added.