The government has finally given a sliver of information about the presence of the omicron variant of Covid-19.

In a tweet last Monday, Health Minister Chris Fearne said that two thirds of the Covid-19 cases which were sequenced by the health authorities were of the omicron variant.

A tweet, nothing more. Let’s give them some crumbs of information, maybe they’ll be quiet.

We do not know what period of time the minister is referring to. We can only presume that it starts from the first day when omicron was first identified, which was 23 December. Since then, we’ve had thousands of new cases, and we probably will have many more in the days and weeks to come.

Well, given what was happening in other countries, which were daily reporting a huge surge of new cases and saying that a good percentage of them were of the omicron variant, we knew that Malta would not have been an exception. The government did little to contain the spread, choosing to simply request the wearing of masks in public as the only measure applied before it was too late.

The data that was being provided by the health authorities on a daily basis was showing a huge rise in the number of cases, and so it was only natural to assume that Malta had not been spared the omicron onslaught. As has been reported multiple times, omicron is several times more contagious than other variants of the virus.

But we’ve had little information coming from the health authorities since what we can describe as an outbreak of omicron cases. We had that press conference on 23 December, when Fearne announced the first omicron cases, and that tweet on Monday.

It is a shame that the people are being left in the dark about this. We deserve a daily update of omicron cases, and not simply via a tweet. Fearne, and health authorities, in particular health superintendent Charmaine Gauci, should make themselves more available on a more regular basis.

The government is not being forthcoming on other matters too.

For one thing, it is still refusing to say how many of the cases being identified are of people who have not been vaccinated. It is a crucial statistic to understand what is exactly happening.

We are being told that the vaccination campaign is working. Yes, the number of people taking the booster jabs is comforting, but then we do not know how many people who have been vaccinated – including with the booster jab – have contracted the virus.

Is the government afraid of letting us know? Are the number of vaccinated people who are still getting infected too high for comfort, and the government does not want this to affect its vaccination campaign?

And what about the people in hospital with the virus, whose number is increasing on a daily basis? Is the majority of them vaccinated or not?

Were the people who unfortunately succumbed to the virus been vaccinated or not?

Such information should be provided, regularly.