TENERIFE, Spain — Passengers started evacuating the cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak on Sunday shortly after the vessel arrived off the Spanish island of Tenerife, beginning the process of sending them back to their home countries.
The first group of passengers, wearing facemasks and head-to-toe personal protective equipment, were kept strictly secluded from members of the public as a small boat brought them ashore.
A medical tent was set up ready to receive passengers across what is expected to be a two-day operation at the island’s Granadilla port, with buses on hand to take them to the airport, where countries have arranged special flights to take them home.
The first plane carrying 14 Spanish passengers departed Tenerife on Sunday for the Spanish capital Madrid.
Six confirmed cases of hantavirus and two suspected cases have been linked to the outbreak on the ship, the World Health Organization said Friday. Three of those people have died, officials said, including two who died while aboard the ship.
The ship is anchored offshore in the Canary Islands to enable the evacuation after Spanish officials overruled local leaders who had opposed the move, fearful of the infection risk and any potential economic hit to Tenerife’s tourism-dominated economy.
“The risk to the public is low,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu told reporters after the first plane departed. “So they shouldn’t be scared and they shouldn’t panic.”
“Based on scientific assessment and based on evidence, the risk is low,” he added.
In their home countries, many will be taken onward to isolation facilities.
The WHO is recommending a long quarantine period. Diana Rojas, head of high-impact diseases, said Sunday that “we cannot be sure that they will not develop symptoms until 42 days have passed.”
Speaking to reporters in Tenerife on Sunday, Monica García, Spain’s health minister, said that all passengers on the ship continue to be “asymptomatic.”
Garcia said passengers from the Netherlands would be the next group to leave the vessel after Spanish citizens, with their plane also carrying German, Belgian and Greek passengers, as well as part of the crew.
Passengers from Turkey, France, the U.K. and the U.S. will then be evacuated, followed by six people from “Australia, New Zealand and Asia,” she said, as part of the last flight planned for Monday.
Dr. Boris Pavlin, a WHO medical epidemiologist, told NBC News the operation had been “extremely efficient.”
Passengers have been coming off the ship on boats “in small numbers, placed on buses and spaced apart, just to make sure that — even though all of them are asymptomatic, they have no symptoms right now — that they don’t present any additional new risk to each other,” he said.
“This is not Covid,” he added. “In Covid, we’ve all been traumatized by how people you didn’t even think were sick were already spreading it, [but] we have no reason to believe that that’s happening here.”
The 17 Americans still aboard the Hondius will be flown to the United States and will be observed at the National Quarantine Unit, a facility on the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha that specializes in handling patients with highly hazardous communicable diseases, the medical center said.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement Friday.
The Dutch-owned ship, along with some crew and the passengers’ luggage, will continue on the five-day journey to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, according to cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
The body of a person who died on board will also remain on the ship, which will undergo a disinfection process in the Netherlands, García said.
Health officials have stressed that the risk to the global population and to the residents of Tenerife, off the coast of western Africa, is low.
People get hantavirus through contact with rodents, especially when exposed to their urine, droppings and saliva. The origin of the first case “suggest possible exposure to rodents during bird watching activities,” the WHO said.
Of the group of viruses, only the Andes — the strain in the Hondius case — is known to spread between people, but those people usually have very close contact with each other, according to the WHO.
On May 2, a month after the ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, “a cluster of passengers with severe respiratory illness” on board was reported to the WHO, the health organization said.
At that time, the ship had 147 passengers and crew, but 34 passengers and crew had previously disembarked, the WHO said.
The report came weeks after the first death, a Dutch man who died on board on April 11. At that point, “the cause of death was unknown and there was no evidence of a virus or contagion on board,” Oceanwide Expeditions has said.
His wife died at a South African clinic on April 26, the WHO said.
The third fatality, a German woman, happened on board on May 2, according to the WHO and Oceanwide Expeditions.
Two days later, hantavirus was confirmed in a passenger who had been medically evacuated to a hospital in South Africa, the company said.
Hantavirus can have a fatality rate of around 40%-50%, the WHO says, and the elderly are particularly at risk. The average age of those aboard the ship is 65 years old, it said.
Phil Helsel reported from Los Angeles, Freddie Clayton from London, and Mo Abbas and Daniele Hamamdjian from Tenerife
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