The government was forced to order a drastic shutdown because it had failed to take the necessary precautions earlier, Opposition leader Bernard Grech said on Thursday.
Grech was speaking in parliament during an urgent debate called by the Opposition the morning after the government ordered a quasi-lockdown, shutting schools and all non-essential shops.
“We first heard about the variant in December. This was a month before Prime Minister Robert Abela's claims we will hit the ground running and will soon be 'business as usual'. This is worrying because it shows that whoever should be addressing the problem is not even realising there is one.
"These irresponsible claims suggest he [Abela] was in denial and was not accepting the fact things were serious," Grech said.
The Opposition, he said, had been calling on the government to take precautions since the variant started spreading abroad but it failed to do so. Medical experts had also sounded similar warnings.
Instead, the government seemed intent on blaming the situation on the variant but the truth was it had failed to act in a timely manner and things quickly got out of hand.
Abela's government was also "fixated on telling the people everything was in order", Grech said.
Malta currently has among the highest number of new COVID-19 cases in the world. Some 61 per cent of the cases are of the highly-infectious UK variant.
Going through a series of messages he received from "hundreds of people", Grech said the public was worried. He hoped the government now understood that the situation at hand is "serious" and thousands of people are impacted directly.
On the elderly, Grech said the people would be making the necessary sacrifices so that their efforts in the past year would not be in vain.
"This government has failed and has no idea so it is now up to the people to take matters into their own hands. Everyone must now work together to keep the situation under control," Grech said.
Concluding, the Opposition leader said that because of the prime minister's failures, the people continued to struggle. He urged the nation to unite in the fight against the virus.
Earlier, Abela said during the same debate that all his COVID-19 decisions were "guided by scientific evidence" and insisted Malta took "all the necessary decisions" to control the spread.