Spanish emergency services on Friday were making final arrangements to receive more than 140 passengers and crew from the MV Hondius, a cruise ship stricken by hantavirus, as the vessel steams toward Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The Dutch-flagged ship is expected to arrive Sunday, and passengers will be evacuated in small boats to waiting buses that will take them to a “completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said Virginia Barcones, the head of Spain’s emergency services. Once at the airport, they will be transported through cordoned-off sections before boarding repatriation flights.
The outbreak, first detected in late April, has killed three people and infected five others who left the ship early, cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions said. No one currently aboard the Hondius is showing symptoms.
Hantavirus is typically spread by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings and is not easily transmitted between people. However, the Andes virus detected in this outbreak may, in rare cases, spread from person to person. Symptoms usually appear between one and eight weeks after exposure.
The World Health Organization has sought to calm public fears. “The risk remains absolutely low,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said Friday. “This is not a new COVID.” The agency also announced that a flight attendant who had contact with an infected passenger tested negative for the virus, easing concerns about potential airborne transmission.
Health authorities across four continents are tracing more than two dozen passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was recognized. On April 24, almost two weeks after the first death, over two dozen people from at least 12 countries left the ship without contact tracing. It was not until May 2 that hantavirus was confirmed in a passenger. The Dutch public health service is now tracing contacts of a woman who died in Johannesburg after traveling on the cruise, and Spanish health officials are testing a woman in Alicante who was on the same flight.
The United States has agreed to send a plane for about 17 Americans still on the ship. Those passengers will be quarantined at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a facility previously used for Ebola and early COVID-19 patients. “We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. The British government plans to charter a plane for the nearly two dozen British nationals on board.
Despite the international response, passengers remain anxious about how they will be received. In interviews with the Associated Press, two Spanish passengers, speaking anonymously for fear of ostracism, said their days aboard have been calm, with bird-watching, reading, and talks, all while wearing masks. “We’re scared by all the news that’s coming out, by how people are going to receive us, by how people see us,” one said. “We’re just normal people. We’ve heard that this is a millionaires’ cruise, and it’s the complete opposite of reality.”
Spanish officials emphasized that the public in the Canary Islands faces no significant risk. The evacuations will be conducted under tight security, with passengers moved only when their flights are ready and isolated from the public.