As I was writing my column last week, my family was shocked by the news that a close family friend had been diagnosed with Covid and was in a bad state in a UK hospital.
This person had a lung problem and while he was still in Malta and needed to go to hospital, they always put him in a single room.
When he moved to the UK some four months ago he stayed indoors all the time. But the time came when he needed to go to hospital in Suffolk. This time however they placed him in a ward full of patients.
The one next to him had been tested for Covid and declared clean. A couple of days later he was found to be infected.
Our friend was not checked again and was discharged. Two days later his health deteriorated and he was admitted to hospital where he was found to be infected.
The bad state of his health and the perniciousness of Covid brought about a rapid deterioration of his health. This was a very active man, full of laughter, loving dancing and so on. In a few days he became a wreck and needed an oxygen mask all the time.
Then even oxygen failed. When I last saw him, on Saturday night, he could not speak and we communicated by means of hand and finger gestures.
I will never forget the sound of the air bubbles, like that of air bubbles in a deep sea diver's mask.
By 7am the next day he was dead.
Even in this tragedy there was a silver lining – the ability of Whatsapp to create an ad hoc community from Malta and the UK as friends gathered, virtually, around the deathbed for an hour or so of humour while they and he took their leave of each other. Even so, most never imagined the end was so near.
This is Coronavirus: it is rapid, devastating when it infects the vulnerable and the end is atrocious – the patient remains conscious till the very end and dies choked.
I can only ascribe the casualness we see around us to the low numbers of deaths in Malta and maybe the few relatives of those who died. We simply do not understand the danger or the pain involved. Other countries which faced a Covid tsunami were far stricter in their lockdown and even today when they are opening up and flights have returned, there is a new consciousness among them.
On the other hand, our beaches and streets are full of people and as for such things as social distancing, not even the country's leaders are observing it, not even at official events.
People have returned to bars if not to restaurants with a vengeance after those long weeks when we all stayed in and our roads resembled those of a ghost town. When we hung out the national flag and clapped for the health workers.
Most of that is over. The pandemic is no longer the first item on the news, nor on the front pages of newspapers.
The accent now is on job losses and on the massive help being given by the government and of course, on the political front, on details coming out from the various court cases and the ongoing fallout from the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination.
And slowly the wounds heal.
But the danger is still lurking about. No cure has been found. The numbers, especially in the US and in Latin America just do not make sense anymore.
And dark fears have not been vanquished. On the contrary, they are returning with renewed vigour. The absence of Prof. Charmaine from what quickly became the most watched show on television spawns further dark mutters.
People either do not care, or they have stopped believing. If the numbers creep up again, the dark mutters will become overwhelming and the credibility of the health authorities gets undermined. And if trust is lost, there’s no saying what that will mean.
It is true, quite true, we have now grown tired and upset about wearing facemasks and enduring the many restrictions imposed upon us.
But if we understand the perniciousness of the pandemic, the restrictions are less grievous than getting infected.
When the airport reopens, those who come here would want to believe they have come to a safe country.
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