Argentina seeks to solve what seems like an enigma: 57 sailors were contaminated with the new coronavirus after they had just spent 35 days at sea and the entire crew had been tested negative before leaving .
The fishing boat Etchizen Maru returned to port after some of its passengers had symptoms typical of Covid-19, the health ministry of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego (south) announced on Monday, indicating that some 57 sailors, out of 61 crew members, were diagnosed positive for the virus after being re-tested. However, the crew members had carried out fourteen days of compulsory quarantine in a hotel in Ushuaia (south) and before that, they had undergone samples whose results had been negative, according to a press release from the ministry.
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Two of them have tested negative and two others await the result of their test, said the province's emergency operations committee. Two sailors were hospitalized, while the others were able to stay on board the boat. "It is difficult to establish how this crew was contaminated, knowing that during 35 days, they had no contact with the mainland and that the refueling was done only while leaving the port of Ushuaia" , explains Alejandra Alfaro, Director of Primary Health Care in Tierra del Fuego.
Five hypotheses
A team is studying "the chronology of symptoms within the crew to establish the chronology of contagions," she said. In the opinion of the head of the infectious diseases department of the Ushuaia Regional Hospital, Leandro Ballatore, this is a “case which escapes all description in the publications, because such a long incubation period n 'has been described nowhere' . "We cannot yet explain how the symptoms appeared. This is striking, but we have established five hypotheses which we must finish evaluating in order to establish what happened, ” insisted the expert in infectious diseases and member of the Emergency Operational Committee of Province.
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The crew was placed in solitary confinement on board the vessel, which returned to the port of Ushaïa. Argentina has passed 100,000 cases on Sunday, and the death toll stands at 1,859. The overwhelming majority of contamination occurs in the Buenos Aires region.
