VALLETTA (MALTA) (ITALPRESS/MNA) – Malta has registered 510 new COVID-19 cases overnight breaking its own previous single day record of 362 infections registered on March, 4. Two patients died of coronavirus in the past 24 hours. The latest victims were a 73-year-old man and 64-year-old man who died at Mater Dei Hospital. 361 patients have been declared free from coronavirus thus 3,182 remain active. Until Tuesday, the health authorities administered 105,416 shots of coronavirus vaccine with 35,093 individuals receiving their second shot.
In a televised message to the nation, the leader of the Nationalist Party and the Opposition, Bernard Grech, said that a state of national emergency in public health needs to be declared in order to give the health authorities additional powers. Grech insisted that this decision must be taken as soon as possible so that no more drastic measures need to be taken, which are increasingly becoming inevitable in order to curb the pandemic, which is currently out of control. He said that today’s number of positive cases confirmed that the Maltese government lost control over the pandemic while the situation is leading to the collapse of the health services.
12 associations representing various medical professions declared their concern and said that one year on, Malta is losing the battle against coronavirus. “The resources for intensive care will become completely exhausted in a matter of days, if not hours,” while the age of patients being admitted to intensive care is getting younger and younge.
Unions representing the teachers and other professions in education said that the list of schools with problems of students and teachers in quarantine is growing, as the number of positive cases in schools is also increasing.
The civil society network and the union representing the nurses are calling for the closure of the airport and a temporary lockdown.
The Malta Employers’ Association appealed to the government to focus on attempting to reach herd immunity within the shortest time possible, together with tangible measures to reduce the daily number of infections, as the current numbers will certainly be a strong deterrent for anyone to visit Malta on holiday, and are causing untold disruptions to the normal functioning of most businesses in Malta.
(ITALPRESS).

Source: medNews