Eighteen American passengers who had been aboard a cruise ship that faced a hantavirus outbreak arrived in the United States early Monday morning, health officials said.
Sixteen were taken to the a quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Monday morning. One who tested “mildly” positive for the virus was in a biocontainment unit, health officials said, while the other 15 were in a less restrictive quarantine unit.
Two of the 18 — a person who had been experiencing mild symptoms and that person’s partner — were sent to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The passengers ranged in age from their late 20s to their 80s, health officials said. One is a dual U.S.-British citizen.
Admiral Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at a news conference on Monday that the situation was under control. “The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” said the admiral, who is also a medical doctor.
The cruise ship, the Dutch-registered MV Hondius, departed Argentina on April 1 with about 150 passengers en route to the Canary Islands. Three passengers died from the virus, and several others on the ship became ill or tested positive, health officials said.
There are no targeted treatments or widely available vaccines for the virus, which can result in severe illness and death. The virus has a long incubation period: 42 days. It was unclear how long the passengers would be held.
Dr. Michael Wadman, medical director of the National Quarantine Unit — the nation’s only such federally funded center — said the passengers there were “in good shape” and asymptomatic. “They definitely were tired and needed some rest,” he added.
The quarantine unit consists of 20 specialized rooms designed to prevent contaminated air from flowing out. University health professionals described the lodging as similar to a hotel, where the passengers would be monitored but could not have visits from relatives, friends or other people in quarantine.
The passenger in biocontainment was in a setting more like a hospital, according to Dr. Angela Hewlett, the director of that unit, who said that the person was “doing well.”
“They currently do not have any symptoms and have a good appetite,” Dr. Hewlett said at the news conference on Monday. “Although they’re very tired, understandably. It’s been a really long journey for these folks.”
Hantavirus is a rare family of viruses carried by rodents. The World Health Organization identified the Andes subtype as the one that affected the passengers. It can be transmitted between people who have had close contact.
Captain Brendan Jackson, acting director of the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, said that health officials had described the passenger in biocontainment as “mildly” positive because only one of the two specimens collected from that person had indicated hantavirus.
He said that the tests did not deliver clear yes-or-no answers, adding, “There’s sort of a range in where they can fall.”
On the early Monday flight to Omaha, which came from Tenerife, Spain, the passenger with the positive test result and the one with mild symptoms traveled in specialized biocontainment units, officials said.
Captain Jackson said that the couple in Atlanta had been taken there, in part, to free space at the Omaha facilities, in case more people under quarantine needed to be transferred to the biocontainment unit there.
He added that the symptoms experienced by one person in Atlanta did not necessarily indicate a hantavirus infection. “We’re being very, very liberal at how we’re framing symptoms and monitoring for symptoms here,” he said.
The biocontainment unit in Omaha was activated in 2014 to receive U.S. citizens with Ebola virus who had been evacuated from Africa. In 2020, doctors there cared for some of the first Americans diagnosed with Covid-19.
Several other states, including Georgia, California and Arizona, are monitoring U.S. residents who disembarked the cruise ship before the outbreak was identified.
Seven Americans disembarked April 24 and came back to the United States on commercial flights, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the C.D.C.’s acting director, said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. None had symptoms at the time of their travel, he said, so officials had not seen a need to alert other travelers on those flights or trace their contacts.
The cruise ship docked off the Canary Islands of Spain on Sunday, and epidemiologists and other medical professionals from the C.D.C. met the American passengers and assessed their risk of exposure.
Most of the roughly 150 passengers and crew members had returned to their home countries on Monday or were doing so. Thirty-two crew members will remain on the ship as it sails for the Netherlands, where it will dock, Spain’s health minister, Mónica García, said on Monday.
Carlos Barragán and Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.
Sonia A. Rao reports on disability issues as a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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