A man living in Malta has been waiting for almost two months to get clearance from health authorities to travel to visit his unwell father who is now in critical condition. 

One Pakistani national told Lovin Malta how he first reached out to authorities via email at the start of June after receiving news of his father’s health condition. 

He has been working in Malta for over two years and is a registered resident in Malta. He has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. 

However, he is unable to travel to Pakistan because the country remains on Malta’s dark red list. Persons travelling into Malta from those destinations must quarantine for 14 days within a government-sanctioned hotel and foot the bill for it. 

This is something the individual simply cannot afford to do as he will be unable to foot the bill. It will also put his employment in Malta in serious jeopardy as he will be unable to take enough vacation leave to go visit his father and quarantine in Malta. 

The response from authorities has been slow, the person said, despite submitting an official medical letter detailing his father’s condition and other declarations. It has become worse since with authorities now on radio silence to his responses. 

Around a month and half since his request began, the person is growing more and more concerned that he will not be able to meet his father at this vulnerable time. He has not seen his father since coming to Malta two years ago. 

Reports of the COVID-19 bureaucratic nightmare unfolding are nothing new. Lovin Malta has received countless stories from people caught inside the administrative headache amidst ever-changing regulations. 

Karl*, an Austrian national, told Lovin Malta that he received his second vaccine dose at the start of June but was unable to download his certificate.

After weeks of failed attempts, he emailed a COVID-19 authority and received his certificate but with two mistakes – a typo in his name and the date of his second dose wrongly listed as the date the certificate was actually issued. 

In another instance, a Polish woman who was fully vaccinated in Malta months ago has found it difficult to obtain their COVID-19 vaccine certificate.

This is because the system isn’t accepting her Polish ID card as proof of identity and is asking her for Maltese documentation, which she never got because – as an EU citizen – it wasn’t necessary for her to work in Malta.

She urgently needs to travel to Poland next week to sort out an important family matter and is now seriously considering getting vaccinated again while she’s there so that she can obtain a certificate and return to Malta without having to quarantine.

Lovin Malta has since been informed that authorities reached out to the woman soon after the article’s publication and she has managed to obtain her vaccine certificate.