The 22 re­main­ing peo­ple quar­an­tined at Camp Ba­lan­dra af­ter com­ing off the ill-fat­ed Caribbean cruise aboard the Cos­ta Favolosa on March 17 are now re­ceiv­ing coun­selling.

This ac­cord­ing to a source at the fa­cil­i­ty who told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that many among the group are now de­spon­dent and spir­it­less, hav­ing been locked away for the past 18 days.

“Each day is more dif­fi­cult than the last and maybe the mon­ey to main­tain here is run­ning out be­cause the food is get­ting worse and worse, the wa­ter less and less,” the source said yes­ter­day. “Even the wa­ter in the tank is low, so every­one can­not wash.”

But fol­low­ing an in­ter­ven­tion by men­tal health ex­perts, many in the group were said to be do­ing bet­ter yes­ter­day.

“They fol­lowed up with the men­tal health ses­sions, some­one called those who need­ed coun­selling and it seemed to have been help­ful,” the source said.

Yes­ter­day, there was al­so a change in meals—from most­ly flour-based meals with lit­tle to no pro­tein—to a dish that can make any lo­cal smile, the source said.

“Lunch was sur­pris­ing­ly good: buss up shut with aloo, bha­gi, man­go and pump­kin. We had hun­gered for too long to re­mem­ber to take a pic,” the source said.

There was an ad­di­tion­al treat when the group man­aged to se­cure a de­liv­ery from Roy­al Cas­tle —gorg­ing them­selves on the fried chick­en in­to the af­ter­noon.

Forty-five of the orig­i­nal group 68 peo­ple from the cruise have test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus so far. The last pos­i­tive case was on March 26.

Since then, none of the re­main­ing group has shown symp­toms.

Ac­cord­ing to Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram the re­main­ing Ba­lan­dra group will not be test­ed un­til the ma­jor­i­ty of their cur­rent 14-day quar­an­tine is com­plete.

Each time a mem­ber of the group tests pos­i­tive the quar­an­tine pe­ri­od will be restart­ed.

Paras­ram told Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day that re­lease pro­to­cols are al­ready be­ing looked at for the group once they re­main healthy. He said they are cur­rent­ly be­ing iso­lat­ed from each oth­er and close­ly mon­i­tored.