I have just come from hearing today’s update from Professor Charmaine Gauci (Thursday noon) and am reflecting on the implications of the news she announced.

Two new cases, none Maltese – a Sudanese man and a Romanian woman. Twelve have been declared recovered but an elderly man has been moved from a general ward to ITU.

The questions by the journalists were a mixed bunch, some too technical to be tackled in that forum. Others wanted to get her to predict when will Malta be able to declare the end of the pandemic or when will local football be allowed to restart – questions to which she could not give an answer since these depend on decisions yet to be taken (and not by her alone) and which ultimately depend on how each one of us will behave.

Meanwhile many of us are following the news from abroad and can see the vast panoply of the different situations in different countries and the different outcomes as each country tackles the pandemic in the way it deems fit.

We are on a sort of moving escalator with some countries moving ahead of us and some falling back.

We can also see the results of the different ways the pandemic is being treated. We can now see even more clearly what led to the terrible massacres of the elderly in countries like Italy and Great Britain.

For instance author Roberto Saviano has put the blame for the extent of the deaths in the province of Bergamo on the iron grip that Catholic organisation Communione e Liberazione led by Roberto Formigoni and the San Raffaele institute exercised on the doctors and health professionals in that area.

In the UK, the blame is being shared by Boris Johnson's incapable government and the failed administration of care homes.

The blame machine is running at full throttle. More will come. Trump and the Americans blame China and would want reparations. The American people may come to blame Trump for the various red herrings he has come up with.

People have lost loved ones who could have survived, dead before their time, many times without being able to take their leave, in a death atrocious by all accounts.

You can feel the anger surfacing in these and similar countries and the anger is still rising. There will be consequences especially in the political field.

This brings me to a related subject – the inevitable economic consequence of the pandemic. Earlier today it was announced that French GDP contracted by 5.8% in the first three months of the year while Italian GDP shrank by 4.7% in the same period.

Recessions mean rising unemployment, more company failures, a rise in bad debts, falling asset prices and widespread gloom and despair.

A chart by Oliver Rakau of Oxford Economics showed how the countries who have imposed the toughest restrictions have suffered the biggest drop in GDP this quarter.

Here in our country, apart other issues including migrants, pushbacks and racism, we also have to deal with the Opposition forcing a debate on the sale of three hospitals the day after an analysis showed huge cost overruns in the original Mater Dei construction when today’s Opposition was in government.

The scale of problems we will have to face once the lockdown is eased are so huge that all other problems pale in comparison.

Take, for example, Air Malta and the airport. It is now clear that liberalisation of travel will be one of the last to be eased, a logical step considering the virus came from abroad. If this is the case, a huge part of our tourist industry is doomed. It will take years for it to reach the levels we have grown used to.

Jobs will be lost and people will get hurt. Yet any other alternative will mean more infections, more deaths and will actually take longer to recuperate.

Shaking off the virus is not the end of the pain but the beginning of a new and possibly more painful phase.

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