/ Agencia Reuters
Groups of passengers and crew disembarked from the Hondius, a cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak, to be evacuated to their respective countries in a process supervised by global health officials and expected to last until Monday, May 11.
The travelers, none of whom showed symptoms of the virus, were transferred to Tenerife airport on military buses to be taken off the island on government planes sent by their own nations, according to government officials, who stressed they will have no contact with the public.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers of the ship starting Sunday.
The planes carrying Spanish and French citizens had departed at 11:30 GMT. Spanish Health Minister Mónica García mentioned Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Ireland, and the United States as the next countries to evacuate their citizens, and the Dutch plane was also scheduled to transport Germans, Belgians, and Greeks.
According to García, a plane from Australia that would carry its citizens, as well as passengers from New Zealand and other unspecified Asian countries, was scheduled to land on Monday and depart in the afternoon.
Hantavirus, which is generally transmitted by rodents but can rarely be transmitted from person to person, was first detected on May 2, 21 days after the death of the first passenger, by South African health officials when testing a British man who was in intensive care. Two other former passengers have since died.
The luxury cruise ship set sail last Wednesday, May 6, heading to Spain from the coast of Cape Verde, after the WHO and the European Union asked the country to manage the evacuation of passengers following the detection of the hantavirus outbreak.
The agency indicated that the first case may have been infected before boarding, possibly during a trip through Argentina and Chile, and that subsequent spread likely occurred on the ship.
The WHO reported on Friday that eight people no longer on board the ship fell ill, including the three who died: a Dutch couple and a German citizen.
Of the eight, it was confirmed that six contracted the virus.
The Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is in Tenerife to oversee the evacuation, stated that the organization’s experts are working alongside Spanish health authorities to test the passengers.
A Spanish woman, who was suspected of having the virus after having shared a flight with one of the patients who later died, tested negative in the test carried out late on Saturday, May 9.
The British army has parachuted a specialized team onto the remote island of Tristan da Cunha to provide medical assistance to the second suspected case, a British man who was a passenger on the cruise ship and lives on the island in the South Atlantic.
Four patients remain hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, while a suspected case sent to Germany tested negative.
All passengers of the Hondius are considered high-risk contacts as a precautionary measure, according to information released late on Saturday by the European public health agency as part of its rapid scientific report, adding that the risk to the general population remains low.
The Spanish Ministry of Health stated in a report regarding the fact that the ship passed the relevant health checks: “There are more than 500 cruise ships per year that come from Argentina and Chile, the country where the virus originated, and yet, there has never been an outbreak of this disease on European territory, so the possibility of it occurring in relation to this ship is remote.” It also stated that no rodents had been detected on board the ship.
The passengers will not leave the ship until the evacuation plane assigned to them has arrived, according to Spanish authorities. Thirty crew members will remain on board and will sail to the Netherlands, where the ship will be disinfected.
