Coronavirus: CTICC to be used as a temporary 800-bed hospital for Cape Town
According to Nelson, they had taken “extreme” precautions on the vessel to protect everyone on board, and so she was surprised that they had to go into quarantine.
“The guys wore hazmat suits whenever they took the provisions off and onto the vessel. In fact, the provisions were left on the support vessel for three days before it was offloaded onto the seismic vessel… all the PPE involved in the provision transfer was in fact incinerated,” she said.
According to the paramedic on board the vessel, Reuben David, they made sure that there was no movement of people onto the ship, and policies around infectious control were also changed on board the vessel in response to the pandemic.
“Very early, we started to screen, before we even climbed onto the vessel… temperature checks to make sure we had some early detections. If we had any detections on the vessel we had a plan to isolate people… so yes, we had to take a lot of precautions,” he said.
