Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell has wel­comed the re­turn of six of the coun­try’s cruise ship work­ers.

This was the first group to be grant­ed spe­cial per­mis­sion by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, as part of Gov­ern­ment’s phased ap­proach to repa­tri­at­ing na­tion­als who are crew mem­bers, since the clo­sure of this coun­try’s bor­ders on March 22nd and the ear­ly clo­sure of the 2019/2020 cruise ship sea­son to mit­i­gate the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

An­oth­er 53 re­turned home yes­ter­day and 59 more will re­turn this week.

Min­is­ter Mitchell said he was hap­py that the suc­cess­es re­sult­ing from Gov­ern­ment’s ad­her­ence to sci­en­tif­ic de­ci­sion-mak­ing, en­abled Trinidad and To­ba­go to have ze­ro ac­tive pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es as of May 22.

He stat­ed: “The crew mem­bers can now be wel­comed home as the re­sources are avail­able to en­sure their care and treat­ment dur­ing the manda­to­ry 14 day state quar­an­tine pe­ri­od, and safe re­turn to their re­spec­tive fam­i­lies.”

He added that it was al­ways the in­ten­tion of the Gov­ern­ment to repa­tri­ate crew mem­bers and ap­plaud­ed the fact that this ac­tion com­menced im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the coun­try be­came free of pos­i­tive Covid-19 cas­es

He said: “The Min­istry of Tourism ap­pre­ci­ates the re­spec­tive con­tri­bu­tions be­ing made by cruise ship and oth­er tourism work­ers out­side of Trinidad and To­ba­go and thanks the crew mem­bers for their pa­tience and for­bear­ance.”

Min­is­ter Mitchell al­so wished the crew mem­bers con­tin­ued suc­cess in their cho­sen ca­reers as the cruise sea­son re­opens and stat­ed that Gov­ern­ment would con­tin­ue the re­la­tion­ship-build­ing process with the var­i­ous cruise lines to en­sure their con­sid­er­a­tion of Port-of-Spain as a cruise des­ti­na­tion in the fu­ture. He al­so urged all na­tion­als to con­tin­ue ad­her­ing to the health pro­to­cols to en­sure the spread of the virus is ef­fec­tive­ly mit­i­gat­ed.