More than a month af­ter they left Trinidad and To­ba­go to board the Cos­ta Favolosa cruise, 19 per­sons who have spent much of it in quar­an­tine at Camp Ba­lan­dra were fi­nal­ly al­lowed to go home.

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram con­firmed their dis­charge from the fa­cil­i­ty dur­ing the Min­istry of Health press con­fer­ence which up­dat­ed the coun­try's COVID-19 sit­u­a­tion.

"Those 19 per­sons would have gone through two in­cu­ba­tion cy­cles al­most while they were at Ba­lan­dra. They would have been test­ed very ear­ly on in their stay, hav­ing a first neg­a­tive then, and they ac­tu­al­ly re­ceived their first (sec­ond) neg­a­tive af­ter be­ing swabbed on Thurs­day. So they had two neg­a­tive tests, meet­ing ac­tu­al­ly the cri­te­ria for dis­charge even for pos­i­tive pa­tients," said Dr Paras­ram.

A group of over 70 Trinida­di­ans at­tend­ed the cruise, ar­riv­ing on the Cos­ta Favolosa on March 5. Less than two weeks lat­er, three cas­es of the coro­n­avirus were re­port­ed on­board the cruise ship. They were strand­ed off the coast of Guade­loupe.

68 per­sons had been housed at the fa­cil­i­ty since March 18, af­ter they were re­turned to Trinidad.

The 19 al­lowed to go home were among the 22 per­sons who were left at the fa­cil­i­ty af­ter 46 per­sons in that group had test­ed pos­i­tive for the coro­n­avirus with­in a week of their re­turn. The oth­er three were con­firmed pos­i­tive for the dis­ease on Sat­ur­day and were tak­en to a con­va­les­cent fa­cil­i­ty, where they await a neg­a­tive test.

This new pos­i­tive re­sult, for pa­tients who had not oth­er­wise shown symp­toms, was a sur­prise the CMO ad­mit­ted.

" In terms of those three per­sons that test­ed pos­i­tive, they would have had a first neg­a­tive just like the oth­er 19 be­fore them, they had a pos­i­tive test, they had no symp­toms. We are be­gin­ning to look at it, to see why they had a pos­i­tive so long af­ter hav­ing been neg­a­tive and hav­ing no symp­toms as well. So it was an un­usu­al sit­u­a­tion vi­ro­log­i­cal­ly," he said.

Dr Paras­ram, how­ev­er, ex­plained one of the three, was a spouse of an­oth­er pa­tient who had test­ed pos­i­tive pre­vi­ous­ly and a clos­er ex­am­i­na­tion of the po­ten­tial spread would be in­ves­ti­gat­ed.

"One of the pa­tients who turned out to be pos­i­tive had very close con­tact to an­oth­er pos­i­tive pa­tient in Ba­lan­dra, who is ac­tu­al­ly a spouse, so there was a close link, I am now get­ting the de­tails from the Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health for the oth­er two pa­tients to see if they had a clos­er arrange­ment to some­one else who might have been pos­i­tive in that group be­fore. But def­i­nite­ly, they were all well iso­lat­ed af­ter hav­ing the group on the 26th that had their pos­i­tives. They were wear­ing their PPE, there were on­ly five nurs­es in there with them to en­sure that they were fol­low­ing the nec­es­sary so­cial dis­tanc­ing, hand­wash­ing etc while they were in there," he said, " I don't know if there was a pos­si­ble link, there was the close­ness of con­tact be­yond the so­cial dis­tanc­ing that was is­sued for that par­tic­u­lar in­di­vid­ual but we are tak­ing a very very close look at it to see what is hap­pen­ing."

The dis­charged group from Ba­lan­dra, how­ev­er, will have to go in­to self-iso­la­tion pro­ce­dures that have been im­ple­ment­ed for all dis­charged COVID-19 pa­tients de­spite nev­er hav­ing test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus.

"Mind you they were nev­er pos­i­tive, those 19 peo­ple. Out of an abun­dance of cau­tion, we are still ask­ing them and doc­u­ments were pre­pared to the ef­fect and giv­en to every one of them and ex­pla­na­tions by the coun­ty med­ical of­fi­cer of health that they are to stay home for at least the next 7 days in the first in­stance when the coun­ty med­ical of­fi­cer will call them every sin­gle day. To en­sure they have no fur­ther symp­toms de­vel­op­ing over that pe­ri­od of time and that is our stan­dard for any­one that is dis­charged from a hos­pi­tal set­ting or from some sort of ex­po­sure. If the coun­ty med­ical of­fi­cer of Health de­cides that they want to ex­tend it for a fur­ther sev­en days for what­ev­er rea­son, they can do so as well and they can uti­lize the quar­an­tine act to do so," he said.

Ear­li­er in the press con­fer­ence, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh con­firmed they had set aside 838 beds for COVID-19 treat­ment.

Those beds were at­trib­uted as fol­lows:

Cou­va Hos­pi­tal: 230 beds

Au­gus­tus Long Hos­pi­tal: 50 beds (Set to op­er­a­tional soon)

Cau­ra: 100 beds

Ari­ma Hos­pi­tal: 94 beds (Set to be ready next week)

Tacarigua (Con­va­les­cent cen­tre): 50 beds

San­gre Grande (Con­va­les­cent cen­tre): 30 beds

UWI Debe cam­pus (Con­va­les­cent cen­tre) : 96 beds

Princess Eliz­a­beth Home: 13 beds (To sup­port POS­GH main­ly as an iso­la­tion cen­tre)

NA­PA: 60 beds (Iso­la­tion quar­an­tine for health­care work­ers)

Ba­lan­dra: 40 beds(Iso­la­tion, quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ty and con­va­les­cent cen­tre)

To­ba­go: 75 (Acute, se­vere and crit­i­cal cas­es)

Deyals­ingh said both the Cou­va and Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal are both cur­rent­ly at 18 per cent ca­pac­i­ty.