Jake Rosmarin, a content creator and photographer from Boston, stepped aboard the MV Hondius in early 2026 for a dream voyage across the South Atlantic. He posted gleefully on social media that the ship would be his home for 35 days. Now, he is confined to a room at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha for up to 42 days, one of 18 Americans under observation after a hantavirus outbreak killed three people and sickened others on the expedition.

Rosmarin, 30, spoke to The Associated Press about making the best of his isolation. His room, he said, is more like a small hotel suite than a sterile medical cell.

“It’s a very nice room,” Rosmarin said. “I already ordered a mattress pad, new pillows. I think, for now, my plan is to take it one day at a time and that’s the best I can do.”

The facility is designed to monitor people exposed to serious infectious diseases. Normally, doctors enter wearing full personal protective equipment—gowns, masks—but most nurses avoid entering his room even for meals. “I open the door with a mask on,” Rosmarin said, “and they kind of put the food toward me and I grab it on the tray.”

On Tuesday, nurses brought him a treat he filmed for social media: an iced horchata with oat milk and vanilla cold foam. “This is everything I needed, right now. Wow!” Rosmarin said into the camera.

The outbreak aboard the MV Hondius was caused by the Andes hantavirus, a rare strain that typically spreads from rodent droppings and is not easily transmitted between people. However, the Andes variant may spread person-to-person in rare cases, and symptoms can appear one to eight weeks after exposure. Eleven people aboard fell ill, at least nine cases were confirmed, and three died—including a Dutch couple believed to have been the first exposed during a visit to South America.

“I never got sick,” Rosmarin said Tuesday.

Fourteen other American passengers are with Rosmarin in the National Quarantine Unit. One who tested positive is in the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, a facility for treating people with highly infectious diseases. Two more Americans are being monitored in the serious communicable disease unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The last remaining passengers disembarked Monday and flew to more than 20 countries to enter quarantine.

Public health officials have said the risk of the virus spreading from passengers into the general public is very low. Healthy people are being quarantined as a precaution.

As the outbreak unfolded, passengers were advised to stay in their cabins. Rosmarin left his cabin for only about 15 minutes each day to refill water, get fresh air, and grab breakfast and lunch, practicing social distancing and masking up.

Rosmarin began traveling the world in 2022 after quitting a media buyer job. He has an influencer partnership with the ship’s operator, which covered the cost of the trip. The itinerary included stops at remote South Atlantic islands such as South Georgia Island, famous for its wildlife.

“We saw a king penguin colony — the largest in the world, 300,000 to 500,000,” Rosmarin said. “We got to see gentoo penguins, fur seals, elephant seals, chinstrap penguins, albatross.”

Rosmarin described the MV Hondius as an expedition vessel rather than a cruise ship, and noted that strict biosecurity measures were in place because passengers and crew would disembark on islands with fragile ecosystems. Before going ashore on South Georgia, he said, “we have to sit down in the lounge pulling fuzz out of our jackets. A little pebble in your shoe, it needs to come out.”

Those precautions, however, were designed to protect the environment from passengers and not the reverse. The ship’s cleaning protocols did not prevent the viral exposure. Rosmarin’s planned five-week journey stretched to six when he and other passengers could not disembark after the outbreak was discovered.

“We didn’t really know it was the hantavirus until the night we were supposed to disembark,” Rosmarin said.

Waiting for Rosmarin at home in Boston is his fiancé. The couple plans to marry next year. “I think he tried to be calm for me,” Rosmarin said, “but I think he was also very scared.”