U.S. plans evacuation flight for Americans on cruise ship in hantavirus outbreak

The United States government is sending a repatriation plane for the painstaking process of safely evacuating 17 Americans from the cruise ship dealing with a deadly hantavirus outbreak.

The plane is being sent by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Health and Human Services, and will be used to transport Americans back to the U.S. in conjunction with Spanish officials, according to the U.S. State Department.

The MV Hondius, the cruise ship at the center of worldwide concern over spread of the rare virus, is currently traveling from Cape Verde to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the west coast of Africa. It is expected to reach the coast of Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands, early Sunday local time. 

Sometime between Sunday and Monday, the Hondius will undergo the process of slowly removing passengers in order to avoid spread of the virus.

Since officials in the Canary Islands refused to allow Hondius to dock in Tenerife, the boat will instead anchor offshore.

The disembarkation will happen country by country, Spanish officials said at a press conference Friday. Once passengers are confirmed asymptomatic, they will disembark the Hondius in groups of five in small boats to take them to shore. They will then get on buses and go straight to the airport runway, where their nation’s plane will already be ready for takeoff, the Spanish officials said. 

“I repeat one more day: All the areas they are going to travel through are going to be isolated,” Virginia Balcones, the secretary general of civil protection, said. “There will be no contact with civilian personnel.”

The World Health Organization is working to provide health checks for everyone on board and “assess what level of exposure” each person may have had to confirmed hantavirus cases, Anais Legand, a WHO technical officer, said Friday. This will help the WHO give guidance to the passengers on next steps, she said.

None of the 147 people on board was experiencing any symptoms of the disease on Friday, the WHO and Spanish officials said.

Medicalized planes will be on standby in case anyone develops symptoms but the working assumption is standard aircraft will be used, Balcones said.

The Honidus, a Dutch-flagged ship, will then depart the Canary Islands and head home to the Netherlands with a skeleton crew, according to Spanish health officials.

There are nine confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus stemming from the cruise, including three deaths — a Dutch couple and another woman who died on the ship. The Dutch couple had spent months traveling around Argentina, Uruguay and Chile and spent time bird-watching in locations known to carry the Andes strain of the virus, the only strain that is transmissible from human to human. 

More than a dozen countries, including the U.S., are already monitoring people who disembarked from the ship prior to hantavirus being confirmed among passengers on the ship.

As health officials have been doing all along, Spain’s Secretary of State for Health Javier Padilla echoed the concern for hantavirus — even the Andes strain — spreading worldwide like COVID-19 is low.

“We have already been saying this, the existing situation is of very low risk for the general population,” Padilla said.