This archive report was first published on 14 July 2020.
On July 13, 2020, the Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port in Argentina after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19.
According to the health ministry for the southern Tierra del Fuego province, 57 sailors out of 61 crew members were diagnosed with the virus after undergoing a new test.
However, all crew members had undergone 14 days of mandatory quarantine at a hotel in Ushuaia, and prior to that, they had negative test results.
Two sailors have tested negative, and two others are awaiting test results, the province's emergency operations committee said.
Two sailors were hospitalized.
"It's hard to establish how this crew was infected, considering that for 35 days, they had no contact with dry land and that supplies were only brought in from the port of Ushuaia," said Alejandra Alfaro, the director of primary health care in Tierra del Fuego.
"A team is examining the chronology of symptoms in the crew to establish the chronology of contagion," she added.
Leandro Ballatore, the head of the infectious diseases department at Ushuaia Regional Hospital, said he believed this was a "case that escapes all description in publications, because an incubation period this long has not been described anywhere."
"We cannot yet explain how the symptoms appeared," Ballatore said.
The crew was placed in isolation on board the ship and returned to the port of Ushuaia.
Argentina had exceeded 100,000 total cases on Sunday, and the death toll rose to 1,859, with the majority of infections in the Buenos Aires area.
