Seventeen American passengers taken off a cruise ship where a hantavirus outbreak was declared have been evacuated to a specialised treatment facility.
Image: Daniel Dan / Pexels.
Maegan Vazquez
All 17 Americans aboard a cruise ship hit with a deadly hantavirus outbreak have disembarked and are being taken to a specialised treatment facility in Nebraska, including one passenger who tested positive for the Andes virus and another who has mild symptoms.
The passengers will be assessed and receive care at the ASPR Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the Health and Human Services Department said in a statement. Two of the passengers, one with mild symptoms and another who tested “mildly PCR-positive for the Andes virus,” are travelling in biocontainment units “out of an abundance of caution,” it said.
Their evacuation from the Hondius cruise ship off the coast of Tenerife, Spain, was part of a co-ordinated global repatriation and monitoring mission. The first plane, bound for Madrid, departed Sunday carrying Spanish nationals who will be treated at a military hospital. The final flights are set for Monday afternoon, Spanish Health Minister Mónica García said, returning passengers to Australia and the Netherlands.
One passenger began exhibiting symptoms on the repatriation flight to France, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Sunday on social media. On Monday morning, Health Minister Stéphanie Rist told the France Inter radio broadcaster that the woman’s condition deteriorated overnight and that she tested positive for hantavirus. She was being treated at a hospital specialising in infectious diseases, Rist said.
Passengers are disembarking the Hondius by country, Diana Rojas Alvarez, health operations leader at the World Health Organization, said at a Sunday briefing. Small boats are taking the passengers from the cruise ship to the shore and directly to non-commercial repatriation flights organised to take citizens to their respective countries.
Thirty crew members will stay on the ship to bring the vessel back to the Netherlands, accompanied by a medical team.
Meanwhile, 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,” an official 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 faeces 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.
The WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the organisation’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 co-ordination 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 travelled 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.