FIRST minister Mark Drakeford said the fire break lockdown is a chance to "reset" ahead of the winter.

Restrictions came into force at 6pm on Friday, with Welsh residents being asked to stay at home and all but essential businesses to close their doors.

A further 1,104 cases were recorded by Public Health Wales yesterday - 200 of which were in Gwent. Mr Drakeford said a large number of the new cases are due to community transmission, with people meeting round each other's houses despite local restrictions being in place.

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When questioned on how the fire break lockdown would be any different to local restrictions in terms of levels of compliance, Mr Drakeford said the fire break would "reset people's minds" and "the way people behave."

"It is an attempt to send a message to people who may not have been acting as carefully as they need to of the seriousness of the consequences of that," he said.

"Showing those figures to people today - 900 people in our hospitals beds already, up from 500 at the start of this month, the number of people in critical care doubling in a week, the 40 and more people who have died this week - the two week period is an attempt to concentrate all our minds on the things we all need to do and the consequences of what follows if we don’t.

"I think that over the summer, and its completely understandable as the weather was good and the numbers were going down, some people took the message from that that somehow this was all over, and that if they took a few more risks themselves, it really wouldn’t matter.

"The trouble is, those risks all add up and cumulatively, they have led us to the position we are facing today.

"We have to reset that, we have to reset it in people’s minds, we have to reset it in the way people behave, providing we can do that we’ll have a reset on the demands we are seeing on our health service and the impact on people’s lives."