Shell Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed has con­firmed that 12 per­sons work­ing on a Shell-op­er­at­ed plat­form have test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19.

Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment from the com­pa­ny, a per­son who came off the plat­form test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus fol­low­ing which all oth­er per­son­nel, over 200, who worked the same shift as the per­son in ques­tion was test­ed. 

"This in­cludes both in­di­vid­u­als who have re­turned to shore as well as the re­main­ing Per­son­nel on Board (POB). Of those test­ed, an ad­di­tion­al 11 test­ed pos­i­tive, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber to 12," the state­ment said. 

"Our pro­duc­tion has not been im­pact­ed. The fa­cil­i­ty will be deep cleaned."

Ex­ter­nal re­la­tions man­ag­er for the com­pa­ny, Can­dice Clarke-Sal­loum, told Guardian Me­dia in an in­ter­view they were sur­prised to learn about the out­break giv­en their strin­gent pro­to­cols in place in­clud­ing pre-shift quar­an­tine and test­ing. How­ev­er, she said an in­ves­ti­ga­tion has been launched to de­ter­mine its cause. 

"This, I'll be hon­est, came as a sur­prise to us so we do need to do this deep dive to see what the root cause or caus­es are and iden­ti­fy those gaps and what we will be do­ing af­ter­wards is shar­ing those learn­ings with key stake­hold­ers be­cause we think oth­ers could learn from this," she said.

The cas­es, she said was in­clud­ed in a re­cent up­date from the Min­istry of Health. She al­so said the lead­er­ship team at Shell was in con­tact with those em­ploy­ees af­fect­ed to pro­vide sup­port where nec­es­sary. She said the com­pa­ny was al­so down man­ning the fa­cil­i­ty and leav­ing 29 of 113 per­sons on the fa­cil­i­ty. 

The Min­istry of Health, in an up­date yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed that no COVID-19 cas­es were de­tect­ed from 176 tests done from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween Feb­ru­ary 2 and 4. The min­istry al­so re­leased 20 peo­ple from its care; one per­son was dis­charged from a pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ty while 19 peo­ple were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es.

Ac­tive cas­es now stand at 230.