TOKYO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st May, 2020) The Costa Atlantica cruise ship, whose crew members suffered an outbreak of the coronavirus disease while docking in the Japanese port of Nagasaki, departed for the Philippines, the Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday.
The Italian-registered cruise liner, with 623 crew members on board without any holidaymakers, docked on March 25 for maintenance work at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard. It was supposed to leave Nagasaki in late April, but one crew was found to have been infected with COVID-19 in mid-April. A total of 149 crew members have since tested positive, with some of them hospitalized with severe symptoms.
In early May, about 200 infected crew members disembarked from the liner. Of those, 125 were citizens of the Philippines, who were evacuated to their homeland.
The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic in early spring. To date, more than 6 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with almost 370,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.
