When health minister Chris Fearne last Thursday announced a string of measures to effectively lock down a quarter of our population, it was not done capriciously. The decisions made were taken on the basis of scientific data and on reflection about the tragic events taking place in neighbouring countries, namely Italy and Spain.

The aim? To protect the most vulnerable among us from the ravages of COVID-19. It is a well-established fact that the disease is most deadly among the elderly, those with certain cardiovascular conditions and those who are immunosuppressed.

It is also a known fact that COVID-19 is at least twice as contagious as influenza. It can be transmitted simply by someone touching a contaminated surface and then transferring the virus to a vulnerable member of our family. Malta appears to have been fairly lucky so far.  The vast majority of those infected have been relatively young and healthy, most of them having returned from overseas.

Now that community-acquired infections form a more significant proportion of the new cases, we may expect that to change.

The stringency of the measures announced on Thursday led to an immediate outcry from those who are mainly without family support or whose family members living with them still need to go to work.

This led to an almost immediate relaxation of the provisions, causing widespread confusion.

We still don’t know if the relaxation of measures came about to avoid harming the economy further.

The original measures were stricter provisions but also doable. Take, as an example, Great Britain, a country with much less family support for the elderly and infirm than Malta. There, over 600,000 volunteers are being roped in to allow those most at risk to self-quarantine by delivering food, taking out pets, ensuring they are safe and generally being there to help where needed.

In Malta there is a growing network of people with a lot of time on their hands as they sit idle at home.

There is also a growing army of others keen to offer their services and resources to help others. Local councils are beginning to rope in businesses to deliver goods to the elderly.

Family members could have temporarily moved out of home had the government created a scheme to utilise the huge pool of holiday rental properties currently vacant, by ensuring fair, fixed rental prices against a waiver for VAT and income tax on that rent. Solutions such as these match resources to needs.

The elderly and the sick are the ones most in need of treatment for medical reasons other than COVID-19.

Isolating them from the outside world reduces the pool of possibly infected individuals attending the facilities, our hospitals and clinics, where contact with coronavirus would be the most devastating.

However, we also cannot underestimate the mental health trauma of vulnerable and lonely people, especially the elderly.

While the authorities might have watered down the measures, it really is up to each one of us to act responsibly, to care for the people around us and to never assume that the worst is over.

We’re in this together but we all have choices to make.

We need to understand that the alternative to short-to-medium term inconvenience could be a long-drawn tragedy.