MADRID – Spanish authorities on Friday prepared to take more than 140 passengers and crew onboard a hantavirus-infected cruise ship bound for the Canary Islands, where health authorities said a cautious evacuation would be carried out.
The ship is scheduled to arrive on the Spanish island of Tenerife off the coast of West Africa on Sunday, where passengers will be taken to a “completely isolated and locked-down area,” Spain’s head of emergency services, Virginia Balcones, said.
The United States and Britain have agreed to send aircraft to evacuate citizens from cruise ships.
Three people have died since the outbreak and five passengers who disembarked the ship are known to have been infected with hantavirus, but cruise line Oceanwide Expeditions said Thursday that no one on board the Dutch-flagged ship MV Hondius had symptoms of possible infection.
The World Health Organization considers the risk to the broader population from this outbreak to be low.
On Friday, the WHO announced that a flight attendant on the plane where the infected cruise passenger was temporarily on board had tested negative for hantavirus. The possibility that she may have been infected had raised concerns about the potential contagiousness of the virus.
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Learn more about hantavirus cruise ship outbreak
WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeyer said the flight attendant’s negative result should ease public anxiety. “The risk is still completely low,” he said. “This is not a new coronavirus.”
Hantaviruses are usually spread by inhaling contaminated rodent feces and are not easily transmitted between humans. However, the Andes virus detected in the cruise ship outbreak has the potential to be transmitted between humans in rare cases. Symptoms usually appear 1 to 8 weeks after exposure.
Health authorities on four continents were continuing to track and monitor more than 20 passengers who disembarked from the ship before the deadly outbreak was confirmed. They were also keen to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
Countries are scrambling to trace passengers who disembarked.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on board, more than 20 people from at least 12 countries left the ship without contact tracing, Dutch authorities and the ship’s operator announced Thursday.
According to the WHO, health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger on May 2.
The KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight attendant, who tested negative for the virus, had been working on a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25, but had since fallen ill. She was transferred to the isolation ward of an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday.
A cruise passenger who was briefly on the flight, a Dutch woman whose husband died on board, was too ill to board an international flight to Europe and deplaned in Johannesburg, where she died.
The Dutch public health agency is currently conducting contact tracing of the passengers the sick woman came into contact with before she left the plane.
On Friday, British health authorities announced that a third British passenger on the ship was suspected of being infected with hantavirus. Britain’s Health and Safety Executive said the person was on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic where the ship called in April. There was no word on the person’s condition.
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Spanish health authorities said on Friday that a woman in the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante had symptoms consistent with hantavirus infection and was being tested.
Health Secretary Javier Padilla told reporters that she was a passenger on the same flight as a Dutch woman who contracted the virus on a cruise ship and died in Johannesburg.
Two other British nationals on the ship were also confirmed to have the virus. One person is hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
South African authorities are currently tracing contacts of passengers who previously disembarked. They mainly focused on an April 25 flight from the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena to Johannesburg, a day after some passengers disembarked on the island.
Spanish authorities announce details of disembarkation plan
Authorities sought to reassure the public about the potential exposure of the general population of the Canary Islands to the virus.
Spanish authorities said on Friday that once the ship reached Tenerife, passengers would be evacuated to buses in small boats before repatriation flights were ready. Passengers will be transported in isolated and guarded vehicles, officials said, adding that the part of the airport through which they will pass will be sealed off.
Balcones said Spain has requested planes with medical equipment in case passengers develop symptoms to avoid contact with the general population, but it was unclear whether they would be available.
The United States has agreed to send a plane to repatriate 17 Americans on the cruise ship. Those passengers will be isolated at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the College of Medicine of Nebraska, the hospital said in a statement.
The dedicated biocontainment and isolation unit in Omaha was previously used to treat Ebola patients and some of the first COVID-19 patients. Nebraska Medicine is one of the few hospitals in the United States with a specialized treatment unit for patients with extremely dangerous infectious diseases.
“We are prepared for exactly this situation,” Nebraska Medicine CEO Dr. Michael Ash said in a statement Friday.
The British government also announced that it would arrange for a chartered plane to evacuate the approximately 20 British passengers and crew.
— Suman Naishadam
Associated Press writers Stephanie Dazio in Berlin and Molly Kuel in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
