‘Collateral damage’: tortuous ordeal of the seafarers left marooned by Covid

The pandemic caused chaos within global shipping and crew members from some of the poorest nations paid a high price

Among the hundreds of thousands of seafarers left stranded by Covid-19, perhaps none have faced an ordeal as extreme as that of the i-Kiribatis.

Last weekend, after a year-long odyssey across continents - shuttled between foreign nations and locked out of their homeland as waves of coronavirus closed down previously safe routes - that ordeal finally came to an end.