Older people in Malta were the only category to experience a full, State-mandated lockdown in the first months of the pandemic. They were also the first to take the brunt of the second wave in summer unleashed by the G7 ‘hotel takeover’ party, which then saw COVID-19 knocking on the doors of old people’s homes.
Yet with the vaccination rollout gaining momentum among the oldest generations – but with the virus still spreading wildly in a third wave among the yet to be vaccinated age brackets, the death toll among the young is also bound to increase.
Still with the death toll mounting in the past months, jumping from a daily 40 cases in October to 200 in December to over 330 now, and with most victims being in the older age groups, many from across the generation spectrum who were holed up in their abodes, are increasingly appalled by the carefree behaviour of those who have rushed back to normality. In such a scenario it is easy to stereotype the carefree as “young” and
Updated 1.45pm with Justice Minister s reaction
Surgeons are being forced to postpone dozens of operations every month because they are being summoned to testify in court, according to one of them who was called to give evidence twice in as many weeks.
Hermann Borg Xuereb, an ENT, head and neck surgeon, has called for the regular use of online testimony that would allow surgeons to give evidence from a room within the hospital without disrupting their entire workday to the detriment of patients.
Borg Xuereb last week received a summons to appear in court to testify in a case at 2pm. This disrupted his day of scheduled operations planned from 8am to 6pm and led to the cancellation of three interventions.
Using cyclists as scapegoats
Wayne Flask, in ‘Wake up and smell the tarmac’ (January 5), cites an Infrastructure Malta architect as admitting to a resident that the reason for the land uptake is “the fact that ‘there are the towers now…’”.
So not the need for cycle lanes? This isn’t the first time that cycle lanes and cyclists have been used as scapegoats for land uptake by an authority that has removed far more where they are needed most and slipped some largely cosmetic one-sided footpaths that cyclists can share (if only they could get on and off them) with pedestrians.