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, NBC news reported.
The ship, the MV Hondius, could be seen in the distance around 5:30 a.m. local time Sunday (12:30 a.m. ET) from the Granadilla Port, where a medical tent was set up overnight.
The Hondius has had six passengers with confirmed cases of hantavirus and two with suspected cases, the World Health Organization said Friday.
Three of those people have died, officials said, including two who died while aboard the ship.
The first passengers disembarked the ship on Sunday dressed in personal protective equipment. They were taken to shore aboard a small boat before boarding buses to the airport. The first plane carrying 14 Spanish passengers departed Tenerife for the Spanish capital Madrid shortly afterward.
“The risk to the public is low,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu told reporters after the 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.
Passengers will be kept cordoned off from the public ahead of their repatriation flights, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s head of epidemic and pandemic preparedness, said Saturday.
In their home countries, many will be taken onward to isolation facilities. Van Kerkhove said that the WHO is recommending “active monitoring and follow-up” for all passengers and crew for 42 days from their “last point of exposure” to a confirmed case.
Speaking to reporters in Tenerife on Sunday, Monica Garcia, Spain’s Minister of Health, 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.
