Passengers on a cruise ship hit with a deadly hantavirus outbreak began disembarking Sunday in Tenerife, part of Spain’s Canary Islands, in a carefully coordinated repatriation and monitoring mission that will include several evacuation flights over two days. The first plane, bound for Madrid, departed carrying Spanish nationals who will be treated at a military hospital.
Passengers are disembarking the Hondius by country, starting with Spanish citizens, said Diana Rojas Alvarez, health operations lead at the World Health Organization, at a Sunday briefing. Small boats are taking the passengers from the cruise ship to the shore and directly to noncommercial repatriation flights organized to bring citizens to their respective countries on Sunday and Monday. Spanish Health Minister Mónica García told reporters Sunday that passengers who were still on board have been assessed by health officials and all are asymptomatic.
At least 46 people disembarked by midday Sunday, Rojas Alvarez said — including passengers from Spain, France, Canada and the Netherlands. More passengers are scheduled to leave later Sunday, and remaining passengers will deboard Monday. Thirty crew members will stay on the ship to bring the vessel back to the Netherlands, accompanied by a medical team.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in contact with the 17 American citizens on the Hondius, as well as seven others who have already returned to the United States. The agency is preparing to have them evacuated to a medical facility at the University of Nebraska, said Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the CDC, on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
A team of six paratroopers and two military clinicians parachuted into the British overseas island territory of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic to deliver medical support for a British national who was unwell with suspected hantavirus, the U.K. government said.
Three cruise passengers who were aboard the polar expedition ship have died in recent weeks. As of Saturday, eight cases of the hantavirus linked to the ship are suspected, with five cases confirmed by testing.
“This is not covid,” Bhattacharya said. “We don’t want to treat it like covid. We don’t want to cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols that … [have been] successful in containing outbreaks in the past.”
Hantavirus is normally linked to exposure to the urine or feces of infected rodents, but the Andes virus, the strain linked to the Hondius, is capable of limited transmission between humans, according to the World Health Organization. Officials are working on the assumption that the initial patients were infected off the ship, either before they boarded in Argentina or on an excursion. However, global health authorities have repeatedly said the outbreak poses a low public health risk.
U.S. public health officials said on a call Saturday that the CDC has a team deployed to the Canary Islands and that it is collaborating with the State Department, Spanish authorities and the WHO.
U.S. passengers will be repatriated on a government flight to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, where they will be transported to the National Quarantine Center at the University of Nebraska, the CDC said Friday.
The WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the organization’s recommendation is for people to have “active follow-up” with daily checks for symptoms while at home or in a facility for 42 days — though it is ultimately up to each nation to set its own policies.
“This is really a cautionary approach, to make sure that we don’t have any opportunities for this virus to pass from others,” she said at the Sunday briefing.
A CDC official on Saturday’s call told reporters that they “hope” the passengers’ time in Nebraska is limited and that passengers can move on to home-based management, adding that they’re “working with the passengers about what they feel most comfortable doing.”
“The overall monitoring period will be 42 days, but this is not necessarily all [happening] in Nebraska,” the official said.
The CDC official declined to call the passengers’ period in Nebraska a “quarantine,” saying: “What we’re doing is assessing and monitoring the passengers, but we’re also doing coordination with the passengers and the jurisdiction where they ultimately will go. We’re hoping that this is a short window, but we do not want to rush things.”
Once the passengers return to their respective homes, the CDC official said, local health departments will be monitoring them “at least daily.” The CDC will also be available for questions. If a passenger is considered as having a high-risk exposure to the hantavirus, the official added, the CDC would recommend “limiting activities outside the house that involve extensive interactions with other people.” Their local health departments might also make recommendations as to how they should limit activities, the official remarked.
U.S. officials in at least six states — Arizona, California, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia — are monitoring symptoms of seven returning passengers and two others potentially exposed to the virus, according to state health officials.
Global health authorities are working to monitor about 30 passengers overall from at least a dozen countries who have departed the ship — as well as two flights linked to an ill woman. Other contacts are also being monitored, including a Spanish resident who traveled on the same flight as the ill woman and a Dutch flight attendant.
Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun, Sammy Westfall, Mariana Alfaro and Victoria Craw contributed to this report.
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