WHO chief tells Tenerife residents hantavirus ship is ‘not another COVID’

TENERIFE, Spain — The head of the World Health Organization stood at the port of Granadilla on Saturday and spoke directly to a nervous island, acknowledging the trauma that the word “outbreak” still carries five years after COVID-19 emptied streets and sealed borders.

“I know you are worried. I know that when you hear the word ‘outbreak’ and watch a ship sail toward your shores, memories surface that none of us have fully put to rest,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement addressed to the people of Tenerife. “The pain of 2020 is still real, and I do not dismiss it for a single moment.”

But Tedros, joined on the Spanish Canary Island by Spain’s health minister and interior minister, insisted the hantavirus that has killed three people aboard the Dutch-flagged expedition ship MV Hondius does not pose the kind of threat that launched a pandemic. “But I need you to hear me clearly: This is not another COVID,” he said. “The current public health risk from hantavirus remains low.”

The Hondius, operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, is steaming toward Tenerife with more than 140 passengers and crew and is expected to arrive early Sunday. No one on board is currently showing symptoms of the virus, according to the WHO, Spanish authorities, and the cruise company, though hantavirus can incubate for up to eight weeks.

Hantavirus typically spreads when people inhale dust contaminated with rodent droppings and is not easily transmitted between people. The strain detected in the Hondius outbreak — the Andes virus — may spread person-to-person in rare instances. Three passengers have died since the outbreak was identified, and five others who left the ship earlier are infected.

Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia said the evacuation would be conducted “under maximum safety conditions.” The ship will not dock but will remain at anchor in Tenerife’s waters, with passengers and some crew ferried to shore in small boats. Everyone who disembarks will be screened for symptoms, and no one will be taken off the ship until a repatriation flight is already waiting on the tarmac, Garcia told a news conference in Madrid. Those departing must leave their luggage behind, carrying only a small bag with essential items, a cellphone, a charger, and identification.

“We want to make sure that every single person who comes off is safe,” Garcia said, noting that the ship carries people of more than 20 nationalities.

The WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the goal is to finish the evacuation flights on Sunday and Monday. The United States and the United Kingdom have each agreed to send planes for their citizens; Americans are to be quarantined at a medical center in Nebraska. Spanish passengers — 13 according to the operator’s manifest, plus one Spanish crew member — will be transferred to a medical facility in Spain and placed under quarantine.

Some crew will remain on board, along with the body of a passenger who died during the voyage. The Hondius will then sail to the Netherlands, where it will undergo a full disinfection, Garcia said.

A separate medical evacuation plane equipped for infectious diseases will be on standby under the European Union’s civil protection mechanism, ready to airlift anyone who becomes symptomatic to the European mainland.

The arrival in Tenerife is the latest chapter in a public-health scramble that has stretched across Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger death on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 countries left the ship without any contact tracing, according to Dutch officials and the ship’s operator. It was not until May 2 — more than a week later — that health authorities confirmed hantavirus in a passenger. Since then, authorities on four continents have been tracking those passengers and anyone they may have exposed.

Dutch public-health authorities, meanwhile, have been monitoring people who were on a flight that a Hondius passenger briefly boarded before that passenger later died of hantavirus. A spokesperson for the Dutch National Institute for Public Health, Harald Wychgel, told The Associated Press on Saturday that three people on that flight who had symptoms have all tested negative for the virus.

On Tenerife, not everyone greeted the news with calm.

“I tell you, I don’t like this very much,” said Simon Vidal, a 69-year-old resident. “Why did they have to bring a boat from another country here? Why not anywhere else, why bring it to the Canary Islands?”

Samantha Aguero, a 27-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, said she felt torn. “The truth is that it is very worrying,” Aguero said. “We feel a bit unsafe; we don’t feel as there are 100% security measures in place to welcome it. This is a virus after all and we have lived this during the pandemic. But we also need to have empathy.”