Four per cent is not a joke

This week we surpassed 20,000 cases of Covid19, and it does not look likely that the wave will subside anytime soon. With a population of 500,000, this is four per cent of the total, not a small figure.

We will soon be saying that it has been one year since the first case was registered. It seems a lifetime away, given the changes that we had to adjust to in the past months.

There were some, including Prime Minister Robert Abela, who thought it would be over by summer of last year, but here we are, approaching another summer while the number of cases continues to rise.

When, last year, the Church announced that Good Friday procession would not be held, many thought it would be a one-off occasion. But, here we are again, knowing that, for the second year running, such pilgrimages will not be held in 2021, just like they were not in 2020.

The vaccination campaign is now nearing the completion of the second month, and Malta can boast that it has managed to top the list in terms of the percentage of people inoculated. We’re told that this will help bring down the number of cases, but we’re still in triple figures and, apart from this, we have to contend with the variants which offer a different problem – and therefore need a different solution.

So far, the Maltese government has resisted calls for lockdown. Other countries have had to resort to such drastic measures to contain the spread; in some cases, it happened more than once. In Malta, the restrictions have not changed in months, with bars and clubs shut down since October while the rest of the country proceeds as normally as possible.

But, as time goes by, we wonder why the government has not felt the need to impose other restrictions, given that the situation has not improved much. It looks like the government believes that, one way or another, and with many people administered the vaccine, the problem will go away on its own.

Abela still insists that we should be the first country to recover – economically – from the pandemic. He is painting a very rosy picture, perhaps not to depress the people more than they are already. But this false optimism will hit back if time goes by and the situation remains the same.

Abela should know, given how wrong he was last summer when he thought all would be over by June/July. And now it looks likely that he will be wrong again, given that his first deadline – March – is round the corner, and Malta is nowhere near having a “recovering economy” as he was expecting. Then, May will soon arrive, and at this point it is hard to imagine that we will have “business as usual”, as he has forecast.

For one thing, Malta’s economy is largely based on the tourism industry, and it does not appear that any time soon people will start travelling in droves as they did in pre-Covid-days. That MIA reported a 76% drop in tourist arrivals in 2020, when compared to 2019, is already a strong indication that many are afraid to travel.

The government should be doing much more than offer empty promises.