May 11 (Reuters) – The evacuation of passengers from a Dutch-flagged luxury cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak will be completed on Monday with flights from Australia and the Netherlands, Spain’s health minister has said.
One flight from Australia will evacuate six passengers from the Spanish island of Tenerife and another from the Netherlands will take 18 passengers, with both flights also carrying passengers from other countries that did not send their own repatriation flights, officials have said.
Eight people no longer on the ship have fallen ill, according to a World Health Organization tally from Friday, of whom six are confirmed to have contracted the virus. Three have died – a Dutch couple and a German national.
On Sunday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said one of the 17 Americans being repatriated has tested positive for the Andes strain of the virus while a second has mild symptoms.
The French health minister said a French passenger had tested positive for the virus and that person’s health was deteriorating. It was not clear if these two cases were included in the six reported by the WHO.
The MV Hondius was carrying 147 passengers and crew when a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses among passengers was first reported to the WHO on May 3.
By then, 34 other passengers had departed the vessel, which first sailed from Argentina in March with stops in the Antarctic and other locations before heading north to waters off Cape Verde west of Africa. The vessel was briefly held there last week after news of the outbreak emerged.
The outbreak of the virus, usually spread by rodents but also transmittable person-to-person in rare cases of close contact, was first detected by health officials in Johannesburg on May 2 treating a British man who was taken into intensive care after disembarking the ship, about three weeks after another passenger had died.
The luxury cruise ship left for Spain’s Canary Islands off West Africa on Wednesday from the coast of Cape Verde when the WHO and European Union asked the country to manage the evacuation of passengers after the outbreak was detected.
Planes carrying passengers were to leave Tenerife for Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, France, Britain, Ireland, and the United States on Sunday and Monday. Some passengers have also been flown to Madrid.
The passengers will be tested upon arrival and then either taken to hospitals or quarantine facilities or transported home for isolation.
The WHO has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers from the boat from Sunday, its director of epidemic and pandemic management, Maria Van Kerkhove, said in a briefing.
Thirty crew members will remain on board and sail to the Netherlands on Monday evening where the ship will be disinfected.
Health officials urged calm, reminding a public scarred from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that this virus was far less contagious and posed little risk to the general population.
“This is not COVID and we don’t want to treat it like COVID,” acting U.S. CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said in an interview with CNN on Sunday, adding the 17 U.S. passengers from the ship would be given the choice of isolating at home or at a facility in Nebraska.
Spain’s health ministry also downplayed the risk to the broader population. It added that rodents had not been detected aboard the ship.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaus, Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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