Signs of a long, difficult year
The government and the health authorities have been cautious in their words when they replied to questions on how far the Coronavirus spread will reach and how long it will take to eradicate. We understand this, because nobody knows and any predictions would be presumptuous and possibly spread more alarm.
But the way they are acting gives one a very strong indication that they are actively planning for the possibility that the scourge will affect many more people and also will take longer to eliminate than even the most optimistic people among us would like to think.
We had, for example, the closing of schools which was initially for a week, but then it was extended till the end of the Easter holidays on 17 April, with the likelihood that when the time comes it will be announced that the schools will have to remain shut further. That’s already three weeks from now. We’re still not sure whether MATSEC exams that are scheduled to start in late April will be held.
Then we had the government saying it was planning to build a pre-fabricated hospital which should be ready to operate within eight weeks. That would mean, if the eight weeks were to start from today, that the hospital would be ready in late May. It is a sign that the government is envisaging that, by then, the number of beds that will be required to treat Coronavirus patients will have to increase substantially in number. And one does not take all the trouble to build a hospital to use just for a week or two.
Lastly, we had the Church saying that all patron saint feasts which were to be celebrated in the coming months are all cancelled. This measure takes us well into the second half of 2020, as most feasts are celebrated between July and mid-September, excluding the feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is held in December. So the message here is that we will still have the Coronavirus to contend with in summer too.
Abroad, similar scenarios are developing and, just to give two examples, the Euro 2020 football competition final stage, scheduled for June/July, and the Tokyo Olympic Games, set for July/August, have already been postponed to next year. That it is believed that one single Champions League match – Atalanta versus Valencia, played in Milan in February – could have been the “biological bomb” that led to the crisis in both Italy and Spain is a clear suggestion of how the virus spreads so easily and can lead to so much damage.
The number of infections and deaths continue to spiral in many countries. Here in Malta we are told that the peak is yet to come and it is not known when this will arrive. In the meantime, every effort is being made to make people conscious that social mingling gives the virus the right environment in which to spread its tentacles.
The authorities are planning for the worstcase scenario, which means that they are taking matters seriously. Let us hope we will not get there, but all of us have to make the effort to stop the spread. The more careful we are, the more we increase the chances of returning to normality, with restaurants full of people, children at school, families and friends gathering together and so on. At present, we do not know when this will happen again.