A challenge without precedent

There have been pandemics in the past and the history books are replete with accounts of the human tragedies and the incredible challenges that different generations had to face as a result

But I doubt there was ever one as resolute and globally effective as the current coronavirus which has hurled at the world this challenge without precedent. One year on from our first Covid-19 case, it is still raging around the world to an unfortunate chorus of new strains.

Needless to say, the enormity and the gravity of the virus threat tsunaming across from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and onto the Americas and beyond put governments and health authorities with their backs to the wall. Urgent action was needed, but which action? Urgent measures were imperative, but which measures? Urgent analyses and surveys had to begin in earnest, but from where, how and exactly why? It was a world caught at a moment of hesitation before science finally started to make inroads into the new viral phenomenon and strategies were being belted out at the same time as updates, corrections and reinterpretations in the world-wide search for a common front against this relentless enemy.

Rewind to a tiny Malta just twelve months ago, with a new Prime Minister and a new Cabinet, trying to come to terms with this overnight invisible threat. Everyone knew it was inevitable that the virus would eventually make an appearance. It did, but we were happily ready for it. Not with instant solutions, but with an archipelago ready and willing to fight it, to provide services, to take all necessary measures and to make sure that as a fully-fledged, albeit small, European Union member state, it was not left in the lurch when dealing with the economic impact and the commitment to a fair distribution of the vaccine – whenever that was going to be found, tested and approved.

A Cabinet team working in harmony with the Health authorities and our ministerial experts to tackle the ever-growing world crisis and its influence on all aspects of our lives as a nation and the economy, gradually managed to come up with useful and effective strategies that would ensure, as they eventually did, that the most vulnerable, the elderly and the disabled were protected, sheltered and reassured that none of what had been achieved for them would be sacrificed or downgraded, a scapegoat of the pandemic.

We were determined to ascertain that our public and NGOrun homes and residences for the elderly and the disabled continued to offer all that, plus a hectic but hugely important run of exchanges with loved ones who, as is only natural, were as occupied and apprehensive as we were and still are as long as the pandemic persists.

Recent statistical set-backs at a time when the European vaccination programme, with Malta’s rate highest among all 27 member states, is reaching momentum only strengthen our efforts to be better, to keep up our struggle against a coronavirus that is showing it will not go without a fight. And by jove, it will certainly continue to get it.

The new and updated measures announced by the Prime Minister last Thursday are a new salvo in the defence of these islands’, while Malta, like the rest of Europe, eagerly awaits the vaccination process to start leaving its positive mark on a bewildered society.

I feel humbled by the determination, the concern and the dedication that I have seen at our institutes, our hospitals, our residences where the vulnerable, the elderly and the disabled have been undergoing this global trauma in the hands of professional carers, doctors, nurses and sundry other frontliners. We do not, however, for a single moment forget the victims of this pandemic and their families, a price too high to pay. This was, and still is, a challenge without precedent.

Julia Farrugia Portelli is Minister for Inclusion and Social Wellbeing