My wife was away for 10 days in Central America on a work trip. Although she’s lived in Malta most of her life, she still has an intuitive preference for French brands. She flew to Costa Rica and back with Air France because of je ne sais quoi.

She landed from her short transit at Charles de Gaulle at a few minutes after 1pm of the afternoon of last Wednesday. As soon as she landed in Malta, she called the coronavirus help centre to tell them she had just arrived from Costa Rica through Paris. What was she to do?

They told her that, as things stood, France was not a high-risk country so she was fine to return to work.

We put on the kettle and sat down for a catching up when Facebook told us the prime minister would give a press conference with an update on the virus situation. The prime minister included France in the list of high-risk countries and anyone who had flown in from there that day and anyone who had come in contact with them since they arrived was being ordered into quarantine for 14 days.

She had been on planes, trains and automobiles for 27 hours but she was going to have to make one more journey.

We packed some food and drove to our Gozo holiday home mostly because it has more windows on the outside and it would feel less like immurement.

I write this on our third day of 14 in isolation. We have each other’s company, which after her long trip away, is a welcome change. And the company of our nine-year-old daughter who mistakes the closure of her school with an excuse to spend two weeks hopping between her phone, her game console and her TV.

We have started to run out of some things like prescription medicines, which is, so far, a minor inconvenience, but will become an issue in a while.

I do worry a bit that after two weeks of this I might get log cabin fever. I’ve seen The Shining too many times to ignore the suppressed Jack Torrance in all of us. But since I’m writing this, it will reassure my wife when she sees it that I can do better than align creatively with the rather useless advice that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

From behind our locked door, the ongoing crisis has become a spectator sport. It should not be. I’ve had some phone conversations with front line care givers at the hospital. They have been speaking to their Italian colleagues and the prognosis is rather grim.

Coronavirus will question the effectiveness of our social solidarity

Closing ourselves in our own cabins and sprinkling our door-posts with paschal blood will not mean that this particular angel of death will pass us over. More people will contract the virus and it seems likely that the illness will take people before their time.

The price we will have to pay goes beyond the medical. Front line care givers will be the most exposed to the risk of contagion and like doctors on a war front, some will fall on the line. Our medical services will be stretched.

If the Italian lighthouse ahead is anything to go by, our medical services will suffer exposure to their limits whether because inevitably everything is limited or because of failures in investment and the shrinking of our range of hospitals and services due to misguided or corrupt political decisions. Either way, the disease will exact out of this community an even greater price than we would otherwise have had to pay.

There is a Malthusian temptation to look at the bright side of disease. It is not Malthusian delight to forecast pressure on our economic realities as a longer-term consequence of the ongoing crisis.

Shops and businesses finished 2019 on shaky ground. The Faustian pact that paid for l-aqwa żmien was exposed and a cold breeze of realism swept the country. The realty industry reported a growing hesitation and a slowing rate of consumption. Whispers of vague and grey looming clouds roamed much before any Chinese doctor had noticed something was odd about a new malady.

The challenge now is of an altogether different magnitude. Coronavirus will do more than infect the exposed and kill the vulnerable. It will test us for pliancy and it will cripple us where it finds us wanting.

It will find the limits of our resources to handle a medical crisis. It will push on the limits of our leaders. It will ram against our spirit as a community, solidarity between generations, our decency and restraint when we compete for dwindling stock. It will question our self-discipline and our sense of responsibility for the community.

In this relatively early stage, our response to some of these challenges is already questionable. It is hard to imagine how it can improve when the going gets tougher.

Even after the crisis blows over and medical genius, a novel immunisation solution or plain old summer heat kills the biological reality of the virus, corona will not be done pushing our limits.

It will question the effectiveness of our social solidarity. It will expose the vulnerability not just of the old and the infirm, but also the poor, the poorly educated and the unemployed. It will dry up the lubrication of liquidity for our banks and our businesses exposing any inability to survive great storms. It will test the usefulness of a surplus in public finances when the people of Malta most need the support of their government.

Coronavirus will challenge our ability to recover rapidly, to sweep away the rubble and reshape it into a new economic future.

Coronavirus will question our resilience. That’s a lot to think about while in forced isolation. Be careful, though. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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