Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

T&T na­tion­als work­ing as crew on var­i­ous Nor­we­gian Cruise Line ships re­turned home Wednes­day and are serv­ing out their quar­an­tine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' (UWI) cam­pus in Debe.

Ac­cord­ing to a source who was one of the 18 re­turn­ing na­tion­als, they were pooled to­geth­er from their var­i­ous ves­sels and brought in­to T&T wa­ters aboard the Oceana Ma­ri­na. On­ly one re­turn­ing na­tion­al was al­ready sta­tioned as crew aboard the ves­sel.

It ar­rived around 9 am and could be seen an­chored a few kilo­me­tres off of the wa­ter­front, North West of the En­chant­ment of the Seas ship which is be­ing used to quar­an­tine some 300 crew mem­bers of Roy­al Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al. Around 2 pm, two ten­der boats were used to bring the crew to shore at the Cruise Ship Com­plex in Port-of-Spain. They docked at 2.30 pm and their tem­per­a­tures tak­en, doc­u­ments stamped and board­ed a Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty maxi to be trans­port­ed to the UWI's Debe cam­pus where they would spend the next 14 days in manda­to­ry quar­an­tine and swabs tak­en for poly­merase chain re­ac­tion (PCR) test­ing.

Their repa­tri­a­tion is part of a brief re­open­ing of the coun­try's bor­ders to al­low close to 1,000 na­tion­als to re­turn home.