Despite some outliers buying toilet paper and noodles, we get so far quite gracefully through this Covid-19. Since my last blogpost, the disease has been officially renamed. I was extremely surprised by how fast Malta actually implemented mandatory quarantine for people coming from risk regions. On Thursday it was also Germany, so Lufthansa cancelled all services to Malta. I should have thought twice to book myself onto a Friday 13th. Then on Friday 13th itself, Malta imposed obligatory quarantine for anybody entering from any country. Immediately three logistic hubs supplying food were set up, and delivery organised. Well, contemporary Maltese food is a bit “English”, you know what I mean, but it will supply you with more than the calories needed. Medication plans for the elderly were put on the road to have them avoid coming to the hospital for dispensing. All very swift and quite well thought through. I am even more impressed because looking at Malta, we have a county which in normal times can’t even implement traffic rules. But when things get tough, you can get a bit of a feeling why these islands have been invincible so many times. Sure, these things are hard to do. And of course, they hurt the economy. Now is the question of how to minimise the effects of that.
I was very impressed by how China was able to impose measures so quickly and curb the new infections relatively fast. Of course, not everything goes perfect, especially when as a first-mover it was not even clear what we were up against. And the effects were not just slowing down the infection rate in China effectively, but also it was a service to the rest of the world, winning time. Now it’s up to Europe and soon also to the USA to learn from that and define their strategies. Actually, this already happened in many cases. A little less dramatic, but I hope equally effective.
It took me another day in Malta until I was able to get a seat on a flight to Amsterdam, and from there I continued by train. Back in “Mainland Europe” people are calm, but take care of hygiene quite a bit. It appears that solidarity is on the rise between travellers. It’s not cool anymore to be dirty, put feet on the seat opposite, spit on the floor, or vent bad smell. It actually never was cool, but some people thought it would be. It could be that also in other aspects, there are some collateral improvements. Suddenly, people really use digital tools to avoid meetings, really do home office and avoid commutes. Last but not least, pollution is down. So is the stock market. But that’s fine. These kinds of crisis seem to have always a common pattern. And one outcome is, that a lot of “bullshit” disappears, all across the spectrum from smelly hippies to financial speculators. All gone. I don’t even know where they are now. On the other hand, creativity is blossoming. Italians perform operas at the window of the apartment they a quarantined in, others find ways to produce protective gear at home, convert household chemicals into disinfectants and find ways to keep operating under these conditions. With all the damage and tragedy acknowledged, I personally do like such circumstances more than boom times, when even the dumbest mind stays afloat in the current. Of course now they won’t sink. But this is a good exercise for the bigger problems we urgently have to solve on this planet.
View on Kalkara on the way to Birgu. I was not subject of the quarantine, but actually there worse things than sitting here on the balcony for two weeks.