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.