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Cruise ship employee is Belize 19th COVID-19 case

HeadlineCruise ship employee is Belize 19th COVID-19 case

BELIZE CITY, Fri. June 5, 2020– Belize had been free of any active cases of the novel coronavirus for 53 days, until today. In a late evening press release, the Ministry of Health said that it has confirmed the 19th case of COVID-19 in the country.

Similar to the first case of COVID-19 in the country that was discovered on March 23, the 19th case was imported into the country. The Ministry of Health has confirmed that the infected person is a 27-year-old man who arrived in the country on Saturday, May 23, on a cruise ship.

The infected man is asymptomatic and was detected during the Ministry of Health’s routine testing, the Ministry’s press release said.

As part of the repatriation process, Belizeans arriving in the country from overseas have to undergo a mandatory quarantine for 14 days before they can re-enter the community.

“The contact tracing for this individual is starting now, and the due process of informing the cruise ship and relevant counterparts has started,” said the Ministry’s press release.

While the Ministry of Health is being tightlipped and not mentioning the cruise ship from which the infected Belizean man disembarked by name, we reported that Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas had dropped off its 14 Belizean employees after the company had agreed to pay for the cost of quarantine.

A press release on Friday, June 5, said that “The first two groups of repatriated Belizeans have left quarantine after all confirming negative for COVID-19.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, thousands of cruise ship employees and passengers have been stranded on the high seas for months, and Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas is among the fleet of ships which had been stranded at sea.

Cruise ships, due to their closed environment, are like an incubator for viruses, according to epidemiologists who are still poring over the COVID-19-related data that has been made available to them.

One study of COVID-19 and how rapidly it can spread from asymptomatic persons due to the close, confining nature of cruise ships, was done on the Diamond Princess.

Diamond Princess dropped off a male passenger in Hong Kong on February 1, and the man tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

When Diamond Princess arrived in Japanese waters on February 3, Japanese authorities quarantined it. One month later, more than 700 passengers and crew members were COVID-19-positive.

The Japanese tested 3,000 people on the ship, said an article captioned “What the cruise ship outbreaks reveal about COVID-19”, published in the science journal Nature.

The Nature article said, “Using the Diamond Princess data, a team reports in Eurosurveillance that by 20 February, 18% of all infected people on the ship had no symptoms.”

“That is a substantial number,” said co-author Gerardo Chowell, a mathematical epidemiologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “But the passengers included a large number of elderly people who are most likely to develop severe disease if infected, so the share of asymptomatic people in the general population is likely to be higher,” he said.

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