KEVON FELMINE & FAINE RICHARDS

The repa­tri­a­tion of T&T na­tion­als aboard Roy­al Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al’s (RCI) Vi­sion of the Seas hit a pos­si­ble snag yes­ter­day af­ter 29 St Vin­cent and the Grenadines crew mem­bers test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 on ar­rival to their home coun­try.
How­ev­er, the tests ad­min­is­tered to the Vin­cen­tians were an­ti­body test­ing not ap­proved by the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion or the Min­istry of Health as a proven test for COVID-19. As such, the Vin­cent­ian gov­ern­ment will now ad­min­is­ter the more re­li­able Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tor (PCR) tests to de­ter­mine the va­lid­i­ty of the first tests.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young will no doubt be mon­i­tor­ing this sit­u­a­tion close­ly as he seeks to ne­go­ti­ate with RCI to have the ves­sel dock in T&T. Young is hop­ing to have the ap­prox­i­mate­ly 345 Tri­nis on­board un­der­go a 14-day quar­an­tine on the ves­sel un­der Min­istry of Health su­per­vi­sion. 

The ship left Mi­a­mi on May 15 to repa­tri­ate RCI em­ploy­ees to their Caribbean homes. It was ini­tial­ly sched­uled to ar­rive in Port-of-Spain on May 30 but that date was resched­uled as the Gov­ern­ment on­ly agreed to open the bor­ders to re­turn­ing cruise ship work­ers last Fri­day. The first two batch­es of na­tion­als work­ing on cruise ships abroad ar­rived over the week­end and they are now in quar­an­tine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ Debe cam­pus.

Young did not re­spond to calls and mes­sages from Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day but a Min­istry in­sid­er con­firmed they had in­for­ma­tion that 14 Vin­cen­tians had test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus up to mid­day yes­ter­day. The in­sid­er said this can af­fect the repa­tri­a­tion of the Tri­nis, who have spent over two months at sea with­out work­ing. By night­fall, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ralph Gon­za­les said there were 29 pos­i­tive test re­sults.
“The rapid tests came back. I was ad­vised that there were 29 rapid tests that are pos­i­tive but you have to bear in mind that the PCR test re­sults will come in to­mor­row evening or Thurs­day. The re­sults went down to CARPHA,” Gon­za­les said.

He clar­i­fied that the rapid tests de­tect an­ti­bod­ies and not ac­tive in­fec­tions. He said sam­ples were tak­en from all the Vin­cen­tians to con­duct Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tor (PCR) tests, which de­tect whether there is COVID-19 in the body. He said there was no re­port any crew mem­ber had ex­hib­it­ed vi­ral symp­toms up to last night.

“We are not the first set of peo­ple to test pos­i­tive from cruise ships and when we test on PCR, the num­bers go down sig­nif­i­cant­ly.”

A T&T na­tion­al aboard the ship said on Mon­day 359 Vin­cen­tians were ad­min­is­tered rapid tests and some were pos­i­tive.

The pos­i­tive crew mem­bers were trans­ferred from the ship to a gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­ty for quar­an­tine and to sub­mit swabs for PCR tests.

The re­main­ing Vin­cen­tians were swabbed yes­ter­day and re­turned to their cab­ins to con­tin­ue quar­an­tine un­til Fri­day (May 29) as they await the PCR test re­sults. 
“The ini­tial tests that were ad­min­is­tered were the rapid tests, which are known to give false-pos­i­tive re­sults,” the Tri­ni crew mem­ber told Guardian Me­dia.

“Im­por­tant to note is that all Vin­cy crew mem­bers have been quar­an­tined in their cab­ins since May 14. They have not been min­gling with the gen­er­al ship­board pop­u­la­tion.”
No date was giv­en for the ship’s ar­rival in T&T. Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that of­fi­cial cor­re­spon­dence was sent to the ex­ec­u­tives at Roy­al Caribbean Cruis­es Ltd (RC­CL) but there was no re­sponse to date.

When con­tact­ed, RC­CL stat­ed that none of the pas­sen­gers aboard that ves­sel test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus.