Passengers on Carnival Magic Disembark in Belize City Despite Ebola Threat Onboard

Dean Barrow

Social media went ballistic Thursday night following reports, factual and exaggerated, that there was a potential threat to Belize from a passenger on board the Carnival Magic. The wide-scale panic was fuelled by news that passengers from the ship had come onshore Thursday. Today, it was confirmed that three thousand seven hundred and sixty two passengers disembarked. Two persons who were quarantined did not. In a real threat situation G.O.B., or any government, would have to identify every local person who made contact with those tourists. But absent a real threat, that’s not going to happen.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“None of the passengers that disembarked were presenting and if any of those passengers were…first of all if the person that they were interested in transporting does present and there is only a couple of days before we know that she is completely out of the woods; then we would imagine that from the U.S. point of view there would be stepped up surveillance possibly of the remaining passengers on the cruise ship. It would seem to me that’s why in a sense the earlier question that Mike asked is relevant. The US isn’t going to as a consequence and the stand we took will say well you know what we are not going to cooperate with you. So if some of those passengers on that cruise ship turn out later to be affected; we are not going to let you know so that you could take steps to try to see who those passengers may have come in contact with. No I expect that this is at bottom a kind of worldwide global effort. We had to take a particular position on a particular issue but that doesn’t vitiate the cooperation that we are a part of and that the United States is not just a part of but is clearly the leader of. So if something were to happen that would then make it possible for us to try, difficult though it might be, to track those with whom passengers may have come in contact with. We will know the United States might have tell us but in any event such a thing would make news so we would know. In the meantime I don’t see how or what point it would serve to try to find out exactly whom those passengers may have come in contact with. I don’t know if the health people see it any differently.”

Peter Allen

Peter Allen, C.E.O., Ministry of Health

“We don’t see it any differently and once again really would like to emphasize as the PM has said and as C.E.O. Wallace has said, there was never an Ebola patient, there were simply passengers. Nobody was ill, nobody was symptomatic and this disease can only be spread by a patient who is also sick. So there is no patient and there was no illness in this instance.”

The disease has an incubation period of twenty-one days. According to C.E.O. Audrey Wallace, the health worker on board the cruise ship has gone seventeen days without exhibiting symptoms. It means that if that holds true for five more days, the nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief.