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Spanish authorities said they were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew from a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship as the vessel headed toward the Canary Islands. Spain’s emergency services head Virginia Barcones said the ship is expected to arrive on Sunday at Tenerife, where health officials planned evacuations designed to prevent contact with the broader public.
Barcones said passengers would be taken to what she described as a “completely isolated, cordoned-off area” after the ship reaches the island. Spanish officials said passengers would be evacuated in small boats to buses only after repatriation flights were ready, and that the parts of the airport they traveled through would be cordoned off. They also said the passengers would be transported in isolated and guarded vehicles.
The evacuation plan comes as countries that have citizens on board move to bring them home. Oceanwide Expeditions, the operator of the Dutch-flagged ship MV Hondius, said Friday that there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection on board. U.K. authorities said they will charter a plane to evacuate nearly two dozen British nationals onboard, while the U.S. agreed to send a plane to repatriate about 17 Americans still on the ship.
The World Health Organization said the broader public risk remains low after a test result that raised earlier concerns about whether the virus could spread more easily between people. On Friday, the WHO said a flight attendant on a plane that had been briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger has tested negative for hantavirus, and Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesman, said the negative result should ease concerns among the public.
Lindmeier said in comments reported by the Associated Press that “The risk remains absolutely low,” and added, “This is not a new COVID.” The AP reported that health officials said hantavirus typically spreads through inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and is not easily transmitted between people, while noting that the Andes virus detected in the cruise outbreak may be able to spread between people in rare cases.
Health authorities said they are also working backward to identify potential exposures from the time before hantavirus was confirmed. Authorities across four continents were monitoring and tracing people who disembarked from the ship before the outbreak was detected, including more than two dozen passengers who left the vessel after the first death without contact tracing. The WHO said it was not until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger.
In Spain, officials said a woman in Alicante who was a passenger on the same flight as a Dutch woman who died in Johannesburg after leaving the ship has symptoms consistent with a hantavirus infection and is being tested. The Associated Press reported that the Spanish health secretary for health, Javier Padilla, told reporters that the woman in Alicante was a passenger on that flight, and that two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus—one hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch public health service is undertaking contact tracing on passengers who had contact with the ill woman before she left the plane. In the U.K., the Health Security Agency said a third British national who had been a passenger on the ship is suspected of being infected with hantavirus and is on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory, with no word on the person’s condition. In South Africa, authorities said they are tracing contacts linked to passengers who previously got off the ship, focusing mainly on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg.
Passengers on MV Hondius also described anxiety about what will happen once they arrive in Spain. In interviews with the Associated Press, two Spanish passengers who spoke anonymously because they feared being ostracized once on land said masks, social distancing, and normal ship activities continued despite the outbreak, while they worried about how people would treat them at home and whether they would be viewed differently because of the deaths reported.
For Americans still on board, the U.S. said those passengers will be quarantined at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine, where none of the quarantined passengers were described as having symptoms. Doctors there, officials said, will determine how long quarantine will last after assessing the passengers. Nebraska Medicine CEO Dr. Michael Ash said in a statement, “We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” and the AP reported that the unit in Omaha previously treated Ebola patients and some of the first COVID-19 patients.