I think that it was Joseph Stalin (of all people) who said “one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic”, and as callous as it sounds, this pandemic has proven over and over again how easy it is for people to become tired, desensitised and almost vulgar in their determination to plough ahead with their own existences, regardless of the cost.

As Donald Trump continues on his road to a coup, Jason Micallef stands behind his COVID for Christmas in the City idea when our cases are soaring and Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are hauled into police offices for yet another round of musical chairs, what I find scarier than anything else is the way people have consistently reacted to bad news. It’s almost as if they’re sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending to sing loudly while a small minority point at the writing on the wall. The irony lies in the fact that the more improbable, ridiculous and convoluted something sounds, the greater the chance it will be believed over the simple, unvarnished truth.

At the beginning of the pandemic hitting our shores, we had daily press conferences and each death was lamented, bemoaned and passed around the public’s hands like a black, ugly rock that we all desperately wanted to put down but couldn’t, and yet, here we are a few months later with clusters of deaths being announced at the end of the day like tombola numbers. By itself three yesterday, another four today and on and on and on.

Pretty soon, we will no longer announce deaths at all and just let the unfortunates’ names be absorbed like water covering a carefully scrawled name in the sand. No one is bigger than the economy: the sun will still rise for Wall Street even as it sets for each one of us.

It’s grim really. Here we are, the most advanced and sophisticated society the world has ever seen and we are further away from humanity than we have ever been. We can’t say that we don’t care outright, though that day will come soon enough too, so instead, we dress it up with phrases such as “life is for the living” and “underlying conditions”; justifications as feather-light as a summer shawl.

This Christmas give the gift of COVID-19 to your loved ones and to all a good night- Anna Marie Galea

Instead of thinking outside the box and offering activities and concepts which reflect the precarious time we are going through, our leaders seem to have vowed to just plod along, failed mechanisms in place, hoping that the vulnerable will protect themselves by staying at home and that everyone else will show up to the party. This Christmas give the gift of COVID-19 to your loved ones and to all a good night.

It seems almost grotesque to celebrate, and yet like the witch in Snow White, who is sentenced to dance herself to death while wearing iron red-hot shoes, we continue to waltz feverishly for our lives. For those of us who ever bothered to open a book, it has become almost bizarre to see the worst of dystopian novels come to life. We know what comes next, but all we can do is try to shrug the weight of the world off our shoulders unsuccessfully.

And so will dawn another week of the world’s most powerful man refusing to concede, our own corrupt being hauled in by a weak-toothed system that seems too scared to bite and more deaths that we could have helped control if we cared enough to. Maybe instead of screaming life is for the living, we should be able to create a life worth living.