The re­main­ing pas­sen­gers from the ill-fat­ed Caribbean cruise still quar­an­tined at the Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tist Camp, Camp Ba­lan­dra, are said to be hap­py and re­laxed.

This de­spite the fact that 40 of the 68 peo­ple orig­i­nal­ly quar­an­tined at the fa­cil­i­ty last Wednes­day have test­ed pos­i­tive for the nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) and have since been re­lo­cat­ed to the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal.

Se­nior health of­fi­cials al­so de­nied re­ports that two of the res­i­dents al­leged­ly at­tempt­ed to leave the fa­cil­i­ty and had to be de­tained. In fact, this ru­mour may have been re­lat­ed to an in­ci­dent in St Kitts, where two peo­ple who were in COVID quar­an­tine af­ter re­turn­ing to that coun­try from Mar­tinique es­caped.

When the Sun­day Guardian vis­it­ed the Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Unit at the East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (ER­HA) around mid­day Sat­ur­day, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Ronald Tsoi-a-Fatt said they were still re­ceiv­ing care pack­ages for those quar­an­tined at Camp Ba­lan­dra. How­ev­er, he re­vealed that fol­low­ing the re­moval of the 40 peo­ple on Fri­day, some of their rel­a­tives had at­tempt­ed to drop off pack­ages for them and these were re­fused.

“In those cas­es, we have not ac­cept­ed the pack­ages be­cause the pa­tients are no longer with the ER­HA. They are now un­der hos­pi­tal con­di­tions and not quar­an­tine con­di­tions. For those who are there, we are still ac­cept­ing pack­ages,” Tsoi-a-Fatt said.

The Sun­day Guardian un­der­stands pack­ages are de­liv­ered once dai­ly by the ER­HA, while meals and spe­cial med­ica­tions which are re­quired by some of the pa­tients suf­fer­ing with pre-ex­ist­ing con­di­tions, such as di­a­betes and hy­per­ten­sion, con­tin­ue to be de­liv­ered as re­quired to Ba­lan­dra.

The Sun­day Guardian reached out to chair­man and pres­i­dent of the Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tist Church of T&T, Pas­tor Leslie Moses, on Thurs­day to find out more about the fa­cil­i­ty in terms of its ac­com­mo­da­tions, ameni­ties and how much it was cost­ing the State to rent/utilise the venue.

He de­clined to an­swer spe­cif­ic ques­tions and in­stead, emailed this brief state­ment, “Camp Ba­lan­dra fa­cil­i­ty is used for train­ing pro­grams/work­shops, fam­i­ly/group va­ca­tion, and oth­er so­cial events such as wed­dings. The com­pound has all the nec­es­sary ameni­ties to fa­cil­i­tate these ac­tiv­i­ties. In ad­di­tion to our lo­cal church mem­ber­ship, our client base in­cludes for­eign in­di­vid­u­als and or­gan­i­sa­tions.”