The government will be pressing ahead with what it has described as the Covid exit roadmap.

Last Friday, Health Minister Chris Fearne held a press conference in which, together with health superintendent Charmaine Gauci, he said that as from 2 May almost all measures related to the virus will be removed.

The two had become almost permanent fixtures in the media in the first weeks and months of the pandemic. More recently they took a step back and have not been so forthcoming, even though people are still getting infected and others continue to die.

It is understandable that life must go on, and this is why the measures are being lifted. This is the latest approach towards the situation. We were told ages ago that we must learn to live with the virus; so now the authorities are just putting this concept into practice.

For quite a while, the business community, in particular hoteliers, has been putting great pressure on the government to do away with the remaining restrictions. For them, the economy always came first even when the situation was worse than it is today – so it was pretty obvious that their insistence multiplied in the last few weeks.

The government, through the health minister, is now calling for “normality with responsibility”. That notion works in an ideal world, but we all know that we are far from living in an ideal world. When restrictions were in place, people still flouted the rules and infected others, including vulnerable people, possibly also leading to their death. Now that the rules will be relaxed, the spread of the virus will continue unabated.

In their defence, the authorities say that the vaccination campaign is limiting the damage, and the fact that nearly all Maltese people were jabbed at least twice, with many of them also getting the booster jab and, now, people over 80 receiving the fourth dose, the level of protection against the virus is extremely high.

They also insist that the number of people in hospital – both in intensive care and in other wards – is low, and this means that the medical services are not under pressure.

But then, the health authorities have stopped saying, on a daily basis, how many people are in hospital with Covid, so we cannot really know about that. The public is not even being informed about the gender and age of the people who continue to die with Covid, almost on a daily basis, in our hospital.

When asked about this last Friday, Fearne skirted around the question saying that statistics are being published regularly, but not on the social media. Fearne knows that it’s not the same thing – the social media has a much wider reach than the website on which they are now being published. It’s as if the government wants the people to forget that the virus is still in the community. And, anyway, the information being given on this website is much less than what the public was used to receiving until the election took place on 26 March.

People’s lives are still being cut short by Covid, and many who survived the traumatic experience of being close to death are still afraid of the “normality” the health authorities advocate.  As restrictions are eased, families are still mourning their loved ones and individuals who were heavily hit still have to deal with their Covid demons.