– The situation is not so dramatic (…) All station employees received an offer to leave the station on a scheduled flight on January 12. Josef Cheek of Polar International, which oversaw the project, told the BBC that everyone had said they would stay at the station and keep looking.
Cech acknowledged that a major hurdle in the scientists’ work was the need to isolate part of the team, but he also emphasized that the research had not stopped. Two doctors care for patients in the department.
And the Belgian newspaper “Le Soir” was the first to announce an injury at the station. On December 14, the first infections were detected at the station among people who had arrived there seven days earlier.
The BBC remembers that last year the Corona virus appeared for the first time in Antarctica in December, and then the last continent free of it, specifically at the research station “Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme” of the Chilean Armed Forces.
At the polar base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, at least 36 people have contracted the coronavirus: 26 military personnel and 10 employees of a civilian company providing technical services there.
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