A Chinese company has donated 100,000 disposable face masks to Malta which will ultimately be used by members of the army, police, and corrective services amongst others.

The donation, made by Hongyo Culture Development Ltd through its local agent Malta Triton Film Productions, was announced by Foreign Affairs Minister Evarist Bartolo and Parliamentary Secretary for Consumer Protection and Public Cleansing in a press conference on Monday.

Debattista said that the masks will be distributed between the army, police, collective services, cleansing department, and supermarket employees with the aim of continuing to mitigate the spread of Coronavirus.

He said however that more than this, the people need to help by not going out of the house.  “You won’t be helping just yourself, but you will also be helping health services”, he noted.

Bartolo meanwhile said that a lot of work is being done in order to secure medical equipment, noting that “the world was not prepared for this outbreak” and that a small country such as Malta which is import-reliant is facing challenges in finding the necessary stock of equipment.

He too appealed to people to heed the guidelines released by health authorities.  “I don’t know how many more coffins in Italy and Spain they need to see to take this seriously”, he said of people who were still ignoring these guidelines.

He said that Malta wants to help other countries such as Italy and Spain as much as possible, noting that while they cannot send doctors and nurses, they had flown Italians and Spaniards back to their countries for free through Air Malta as a gesture of solidarity.  The same has been done for citizens of the UK, France, Germany, and Egypt, Bartolo said before noting that all these countries had expressed their thanks.

Bartolo expressed his own thanks to Germany as they are helping Malta bring home citizens who are caught in countries further afield from Europe. Those Maltese are being allowed onboard Lufthansa repatriation flights to Germany, from where it will then be Malta’s duty to pick them up. “It shows that in moments like this, solidarity is important”, he said.

Asked by The Malta Independent whether they had made sure that the face masks acquired were of a good quality, especially after the Netherlands had to recall and send back to China some 600,000 facemasks that had been donated to them because they were not up to scratch, Bartolo assured that they had done the necessary checks and that the masks were of good quality.

Asked for his assessment about how the European Union is handling the crisis, Bartolo noted that he and another nine Foreign Affairs ministers had expressed their regret at how the Union’s bigger countries had withdrawn from the single market – which he described as one of the EU’s commandments – when that single market was needed most. 

He said that the Maltese economy will probably be the one in the world that is most affected by this crisis the most, as the country’s luck and wellbeing is purely reliant on what happens across the world, something which has always been historically the case.  “Globalisation isn’t a theory – it’s a need”, he said.