Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The crew aboard the No­ble Ger­ry de Souza drilling ship have been quar­an­tined and iso­lat­ed off the coast of Ch­aguara­mas af­ter a COVID-19 out­break on the ves­sel.

Ac­cord­ing to one of the crew mem­bers who test­ed pos­i­tive but wished to re­main anony­mous, around 19 of the 150 mem­ber crew have al­ready test­ed pos­i­tive. How­ev­er, he said they are be­ing iso­lat­ed on­board the ves­sel and wish to dis­em­bark and con­tin­ue their iso­la­tion on-land as the ship is set to de­part for Suri­name on Sat­ur­day.

"I know a lot of peo­ple want of the ship right now be­cause they're not feel­ing well and they're not let­ting us off," he said.

"They'd rather go to iso­la­tion on land be around doc­tors. The risk with sail­ing to Suri­name is once you get halfway there, you're out of medi­vac reach- he­li­copters can't reach. And the ship is two days away from beach so it's kind of a risk. If some­body takes a turn for the worst, you'd lose them be­fore you get in."

The crew mem­ber, who is not a T&T na­tion­al said he un­der­stands if of­fi­cials don't want to ac­com­mo­date them but asked that the coun­try's na­tion­als be al­lowed to quar­an­tine and iso­late on land.

"At the end of the day, there are a lot of Tri­nis that want to go in," he said.

"Tri­nis want to go home and they're not al­lowed to come in. That ain't right."

The crew mem­ber said he's done work with oth­er com­pa­nies in the coun­try which al­lowed them to quar­an­tine and iso­late on land when such sit­u­a­tions arose.

He said the ship ar­rived in Ch­aguara­mas on March 11 from Spain to re­stock and pick up oth­er mem­bers of the crew. He es­ti­mates around 30 per cent and T&T na­tion­als.

"It ar­rived on the 11th, we board­ed on the 11th, we got test­ed on the 14th and we had the first cas­es on the 14th. We had sev­en cas­es. Yes­ter­day (Wednes­day) we picked up 11 more. This morn­ing, as of now, we picked up one more," he said.