[ad_1]
India’s huge wave of Covid-19 infections has affected the international maritime industry, as the country is for seafarers, as crews come with the disease and ports deny entry to ships.
Ports such as Singapore and Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates have banned ships from changing crew members who have recently traveled from India, according to notes from maritime authorities. Zhoushan has banned entry into China for ships or crews that have visited India or Bangladesh in the past three months, according to Wilhelmsen Ship Management, a major supplier of marine crews.
Industry executives also said they were crews from India gives a positive In Covid-19 containers, put in quarantine before loading and despite being negative.
“Earlier we had ships that were infected with one or two people,” said Rajesh Unni, chief executive of Singapore’s Synergy Marine Group, which offers the ship’s crew. “Today, we have a scenario where whole ships get infected very quickly… Which means the ships themselves are immobilized.”
India reported more than 380,000 Covid-19 infections and nearly 3,800 deaths on Wednesday. The rise in cases has broken global records overflowing health systems.
The South African port authority said the ship, which arrived in Durban this week, had been quarantined after 14 Philippine crew members tested positive for Covid-19. The ship’s chief engineer died of a heart attack.
Along with the Philippines and China, India is one of the world the largest sources of marine crew. Worldwide, there are approximately 1.6 million seafarers in the country, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, according to the industrial organization.
Singapore, a major shipping center, has extended a ban to cover crews from countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Executives warned of the restrictions send shockwaves According to UN data, 80 percent of world trade is shipped through the extended shipping industry.
March Suez canal lock “It simply came to our notice then [supply chain] the disruption caused by the inability to change crews, ”said Mark O’Neil, president of InterManager, which represents the crew management industry.
Last summer there were about 400,000 sailors landed at sea due to the pandemic, they exceed the length of the contract. Although that number has dropped, fears are mounting due to the global rise in coronavirus cases since March.
“If travel restrictions remain the same, we may be in a situation similar to the global crew change crisis we saw in 2020,” said Niels Bruus, head of marine human resources. Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company.
“The situation has gone from bad to worse in the crew changes. And that is underestimated, ”said Carl Schou, CEO of Wilhelmsen, which has about 10,000 employees in India.
The Norwegian-owned company stopped crew changes in India from at least April 24 until the end of May. Schouk added that the results of the Covid-19 tests by Indian sailors did not arrive in time for the time they arrived, as “the entire health system has collapsed mainly in India.”
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, Germany’s crew management team, said temporary people from other nations were temporarily being replaced by Indians who were scheduled to disembark or board the ship.
Shipping officials said the seafarers it had to be defaulted as inoculation requirements for countries to enter the global vaccine distribution. But through the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations, which is responsible for the shipment, has thwarted the slow pace of efforts to achieve the blows.
“We’re just pulling our hair out of this vaccine issue with bureaucracy and political ping-pong,” O’Neil said.
Abdulgani Serang, secretary general of the National Union of Ships of India, said authorities had not done enough to vaccinate Indian sailors: “We have failed them.”
Additional news from Jyotsna Singh in New Delhi
[ad_2]
Source link
