The elderly are possibly the cohort of the population that suffered the most during the pandemic. First, they are more vulnerable to the ravages of COVID, especially in its earlier strains, than anyone else except for the immunocompromised.

Secondly, for this reason, it was decided that the only way to protect them was to isolate them. This was the right decision during the times when COVID presented a bigger threat to individual health and vaccines had not yet come on the scene.

However, the elderly population experienced some terrible mental suffering as a consequence of this policy. Loneliness is a plague among older people at the best of times, as visits from relatives become rarer and many are abandoned altogether. During the pandemic, all that many of them had for company were blank walls and television and, perhaps, the occasional hello from a carer.

Now, for a different reason, the Ministry for Active Ageing has decided to restrict residents at St Vincent de Paul Residence to their wards unless accompanied by a carer, nurse or relative. This is because it wants to improve security after a resident walked out of the place in the middle of the night two weeks ago and has not been seen since.

The instruction to staff was at first rejected by the nurses’ union, the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses, which rightly called it “inhumane”. Union head Paul Pace pointedly said that SVDP “has a licence as a hospital, not a prison”.

But it appears that, given the threat of disciplinary action against staff who fail to enforce the rule, it is, indeed, being enforced.

It has elicited a painful complaint from at least one 93-year-old resident, who must have voiced the feelings of many others – perhaps not in a position to articulate them as well – when he said the new rules are “an encroachment of my personal liberty”. In a letter to management, Joseph Scerri said the decision was rekindling “unhappy memories” of when residents were locked up during the pandemic.

“It seems [you are] trying to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut and applying a ‘one size fits all’ procedure. This is unacceptable to me as you are restricting my freedom,” wrote Scerri, who often left the home to run errands before the new rule was imposed.

The Ministry for Active Ageing has justified its decision by saying the incident of the missing man “challenged the concept of open wards”. Well, if the ministry wants to live up to the ‘active’ in its name, it needs to come up with another solution.

Scerri is absolutely right: this blanket rule is unacceptable. It smacks of the extreme form of reaction that we so often see from the authorities in Malta, when the weak are “sledgehammered” by a two weights, two measures approach. Because, well, it’s the easiest route to take and we can’t be bothered to devise a more reasonable and nuanced approach.

So we went from having the most liberal approach to COVID to having the strictest, most unrelenting regime in Europe. Businesses want to make more money in Valletta? No problem, let’s allow them to disturb the sleep of residents by playing music late into the night.

If security is a problem at St Vincent de Paul, then the Ministry for Active Ageing must come up with measures that are far less lazy, incompetent and cruel.

While it needs to protect its clients from physical harm, it is equally obliged to protect them from psychological damage.