The Ministry of Health does not yet have any financial information about the cost of COVID-19 to Malta’s healthcare system.
It is now impossible to estimate how much it cost the Maltese government to battle the COVID-19 epidemic, and it is very unlikely that this number will ever be revealed.
In response to a query raised in the Maltese parliament by the Nationalist Party’s Robert Cutajar, the Minister of Health, Chris Fearne, said that he was unable to disclose the overall cost that COVID-19 will have on Malta’s healthcare system.
According to Fearne, “details on financial information linked to the recovery of each and every individual patient in the health sector are not retained.” “It is impossible to ascertain such a number,” the speaker said.
In response to questions that were posed to the Ministry of Health, it was discovered that despite the fact that the Ministry of Health calculates the costs of procedures, bed stays, medical treatments, and investigations, “bills” are not compiled for specific individuals who are being treated as patients.
Therefore, although records of expenses are preserved in a more broad sense, there are no records kept on a patient-by-patient basis.
Fearne said that the cost of an overnight stay in the Intensive Care Unit at Mater Dei Hospital may range anywhere from $1,325 to $1,500, which she mentioned during the session in the House of Representatives.
As of the 20th of May, the Maltese healthcare sector has assisted 352 patients in recovering from major difficulties caused by the virus while they were staying in the intensive care unit (ITU).
That indicates that although ITU recoveries on their own racked up a cost of up to €528,000, not much information is now available on the state’s expenses on medicines like as testing, vaccines, anti-virals, intravenous drips, and any other medicinals needed to battle COVID-19. During this time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruited a large number of additional staff members to assist with the management of the contact-tracing system.