Numbers point fingers in one direction only

Numbers do not lie. They may be twisted this way and that, interpreted up or down but at the end they remain stolidly there, stone-faced, inflexible and inelastic.

Enough words have been spent by this long-suffering population over the past days and hours regarding this huge spike in Covid infections.

The attempts by the prime minister and his acolytes to somehow minimise the spike – waves are in the sea; the spike is to be blamed on the migrants; we are not yet on the British black book – are as pathetic as they are false.

Up to just a few weeks ago, Malta was being praised as the model country and an example how to tackle the pandemic. Now we have been sent to the back of the class and we are being shunned by many.

How could we get it so wrong? As long as the battle was being waged by the health experts we were containing the spread of the virus. But the minute politicians muscled their way in and then the politicians started to listen to the business people, all restraint was thrown out. And the virus came back with vengeance.

There is a way out of this dangerous situation: drastic and immediate lockdown. Other countries and cities have done that and though hard it seems to have worked. See Melbourne for instance and parts of Spain. And I doubt if their R factor is more than 2 as ours is.

Our information is patchy – we do not know which sections of our society are being infected, not even which towns and villages nor how have people become infected except for some sporadic cases. And information about infections at Santa Venera dried up after a day or two – presumably the residents objected to being called the Covid capital of Malta.

The explosion that set this conflagration off seems to have been the party at the Radisson followed by the spark that reached Santa Venera. Then followed at least two branches – a spike originating in Paceville and Covid-infected migrants coming in from the sea.

In her first re-appearance on TV the Superintendent of Public Health, face-masked Charmaine Gauci said that infections at Santa

Venera were more than the Radisson infected and that a new hub regarded English language school students.

Not all infections could be stopped on time but surely there is a huge difference between remaining locked-in and removing all restraints.

Take the airport, for instance, the major entry point. Other countries do things differently – some ask for certification, others take tests at landing. There have been complaints in other countries that may apply to ours, such as the massing of people in the buses taking people to planes.

The virus is with us and will not go away. But we can at least learn from other countries. Mostly, I would say, enforcement remains our weak point and it is this that made us slide from Europe's best to the state we're in. We all relaxed, buoyed by the repeated insistence that we are the best.

Now strangely enough, in a bid to do something the prime minister met the MCESD. It was a strange sight – Charmaine Gauci who seemed to be the only woman present facing a long table with men.

The MCESD had never been involved in previous discussions regarding the pandemic. So why now? The proper place where representatives of the people meet is Parliament, which has all the problems we know about.

True to form, the MCESD meeting of various categories of people found itself in the middle of a tugof-war between the government and the doctors' association MAM which remained unresolved after long hours of discussion.

Although there is some merit in meeting the social partners, this cannot become the alternative to the proper forum for discussion and taking the right decision. Nor can it become an alibi for whoever has to take the decision or shoulder one's responsibility.

From Dr Gauci's re-appearance on Friday it does not seem more strict measures will be taken but rather more enforcement of the already-known rules with a tweaking here and there.

But the massive way in which those responsible abandoned their remit will be very hard to pull back. That will remain for ever the blame of he who consistently undermined the warnings by the health authorities. There is no other way to say this.