Caribbean Air­lines is en­sur­ing that they are ob­serv­ing all pro­to­cols re­lat­ed to the nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) and "will con­tin­ue to work close­ly with port au­thor­i­ty health of­fi­cials to not on­ly safe­guard their crew but the wel­fare of pas­sen­gers."

This was the as­sur­ance from CAL's head of Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Dionne Ligoure on Wednes­day.

Ligoure told Guardian Me­dia that the cur­rent glob­al pan­dem­ic was a wor­ry­ing con­cern for the world and cit­i­zens of this coun­try and the air­line had been ob­serv­ing cer­tain pro­to­cols and guide­lines when re­spond­ing to any mat­ters re­lat­ed to COVID-19.

Her com­ment came even as 68 T&T na­tion­als re­turned home Wednes­day af­ter fi­nal­ly get­ting clear­ance to leave Guade­loupe, where they had been stuck on an ill-fat­ed cruise ship where peo­ple aboard test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. This group was pre­ced­ed by two women who re­turned home on Tues­day night. This duo test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus while in-tran­sit to T&T and were im­me­di­ate­ly tak­en to one of the quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties at ei­ther the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal or the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal.

Ligoure said she could not com­ment specif­i­cal­ly on Guardian Me­dia's ex­clu­sive sto­ry about two con­firmed fe­male cas­es who came aboard the CAL flight from Bar­ba­dos on Tues­day night, hours be­fore the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port stopped ac­cept­ing non-na­tion­als in­to the coun­try for the next two weeks.

But she en­cour­aged the me­dia, in gen­er­al, to be re­spon­si­ble and mind­ful of how they re­port on COVID-19 mat­ters.

Ligoure em­pha­sised that every ef­fort was be­ing made to safe­guard their crew mem­bers, who re­main com­mit­ted to work­ing even in the face of this pan­dem­ic.

The Min­istry of Health on Tues­day night re­port­ed that the con­firmed num­ber of COVID-19 cas­es had gone up to sev­en and all were im­port­ed cas­es.