Malta will next week announce a strategy to ease COVID-19 restrictions, Health Minister Chris Fearne has announced. 

“The Health Department is currently working on an exit roadmap for the weeks ahead which will see us remove the measures that are currently in place step by step,” Fearne said on ONE Radio’s Sibt il-Punt this morning.

“We will announce this roadmap next week, and it will include precise dates on when measures will be removed. It’s important for measures to be announced on time but also for them to be removed on time, and according to our data and information, we can now start working on these plans.”

Fearne didn’t specify what restrictions will be eased and whether these will include controversial new vaccine establishment entry rules that came into force at the start of the week. 

However, he said that Mater Dei managed to withstand the Omicron wave of recent months and that Malta now has one of the highest booster uptake rates worldwide, with around 75% of adults receiving the booster.

“Right now there is some public sentiment for these measures to be removed and a recent study showed that Malta now has one of the lowest rates of public concern on COVID-19 worldwide,” he said. “However, this is because there is peace of mind. I would rather see people grumbling that they want to go out rather than people calling for a lockdown because people are dying.”

Reiterating his call on people to get boosted, he said people should “entrust their health to medical experts and not people who write what they please on social media”.