The Public Health Response Team, which was responsible for contact tracing and case management during the virus pandemic, has been disbanded after two-and-a-half years of an “incredible journey”.

An audit of its work is now being carried out.

The team’s winding down marks another step in the move towards normality as most health restrictions in the country are finally lifted.

The contact-tracing team, including that for schools, stopped operating when quarantine letters stopped being issued and family members no longer needed to quarantine from May 2.

Case management was not required any more, confirmed the woman who led the team – Tanya Melillo.

All additional staff have gone back to their place of work, she said.

About 250 people worked in case management over the last two years for a period of three to 24 months.

All additional staff have gone back to their place of work. About 250 people worked in case management over the last two years for a period of three to 24 months- Tanya Melillo, head, Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Unit

COVID-19 is now the remit of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Unit, which Melillo heads.

However, “we are still working with homes and institutions that have positive cases, as well as those in hospital,” she said.

Also, Melillo’s unit is still obliged to report to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organisation as COVID-19 remains under surveillance.

'The job is not over'

So, the job is not over. It entails working on “enhancing our surveillance for COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, especially for the coming winter, as well as auditing all that we did,” Melillo explained.

“We are now redrafting our plan, with lessons learned, looking at what worked and what did not,” she said, admitting this was “not an easy task”.

In a post on Facebook, the team leader wrote that “saying goodbye after two years and five months of working with such an incredible team is hard.

“I was privileged to have such a hard-working and motivated team of teachers, allied healthcare professionals, nurses, newly-warranted doctors, public health trainers and consultants, health inspectors, medical students and administrative staff,” she wrote, describing them as “one big family”.

'It was an incredible journey'

“It was an incredible journey”, starting in February 2020, just before the first case of COVID was detected in Malta.

Melillo said the response team and all its doctors handled every aspect of the process, with the help of other frontliners including volunteers, who joined forces.

The team was primarily responsible for gathering contacts of positive cases and looking for the source. But they found themselves facing other problems caused by the pandemic – Melillo’s case management morphed into a more humanitarian role as her team reached out to patients who were also suffering mental health issues as a result of COVID-19.

Tanya Melillo

Melillo, in fact, has in the past maintained that other forms of suffering at times caused more pain than the virus itself.

After a year of leading the team, she had told Times of Malta that, looking back, it was the hardest of her working life.

As one wave after another hit Malta, achievements and lows were marked by Public Health, whose aim was to keep deaths to a minimum and hospitalisation rates low.

Along the way, there were times when the COVID-19 response team was hit hard as the situation spiralled out of control.

Its voluntary contact tracers have even faced abuse and threats and swearing and shouting when they called contacts of positive cases and instructed them to quarantine.