Cruise ship hit by hantavirus arrives in Tenerife to evacuate passengers | Hantavirus

The cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak has arrived in Tenerife to evacuate those on board.

The ship arrived in the Canary Islands early Sunday morning, carrying 146 people, after three people died from the virus and eight more fell ill.

While no one on board has symptoms, passengers and crew have been confined to their cabins for the past few days to help stop the spread of the virus, which is transmitted only through very close contact.

Each was being screened for hantavirus, which can cause flu-like symptoms that in some cases lead to respiratory arrest and death.

The 19 passengers and three crew from the UK were due to fly from Tenerife to Merseyside to be quarantined at Arrowe Park hospital on the Wirral.

Those arriving from elsewhere will take separate flights to their home countries after assurances from the Spanish government and the World Health Organization (WHO) that they will not come into contact with people in Tenerife.

While Spanish health minister Mónica García confirmed that the plane was ready for departure when passengers arrived, Spanish citizens would be the first to get off the plane.

The next flight will be a flight to the Netherlands, which will carry citizens of Germany, Belgium, Greece and part of the crew.

Later on Sunday, there will be flights to the UK, Canada, Türkiye, France, Ireland and the USA.

A Dutch refueling plane will pick up passengers who have not yet been evacuated on Monday, officials said.

The last scheduled flight will be to Australia on Monday afternoon with six people on board.

Most passengers were required to isolate from potential exposure points for 42 days, as they would have been days earlier.

MV Hondius is anchored just off the southern commercial port of Grenadilla and passengers will be brought to the pier in groups of 5 to 10 by small boats.

Fernando Clavijo, president of the Canary Islands, said this would only happen when planes are ready to receive them on the tarmac.

As authorities scrambled to deploy the planes on Sunday, flights to some countries could not yet be arranged.

Winds were expected to increase off the coast of the island from Monday, meaning people from countries where flights were not arranged could be stranded on board.

Officials have tried to make it clear that the virus, although serious, will not cause another outbreak.

However, at a press conference in Tenerife late on Saturday night, WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was asked whether allowing travelers to travel around the world and relying on them to self-isolate with no supervision could cause more outbreaks.

“According to our assessment, what you said will not happen,” he told the media.

Some of the crew will remain on the ship, pick up supplies at the port of Santa Cruz in the north of Tenerife, and then ship the ship back to the Netherlands, where it came from.

The polar ship has reached the Canary Islands after spending days stranded off the coast of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. Local authorities were not allowing the ship to dock due to fears of a wider outbreak that would strain the small island nation’s health system.

The World Health Organization said fears of a new epidemic were unfounded because hantaviruses do not spread as quickly as Covid-19 and treatment is highly effective if the virus is caught quickly enough.

However, a broad incubation period lasting between a few days and eight weeks means infected people may have the opportunity to transmit the virus before any symptoms appear.

WHO is therefore preparing an internationally coordinated response, especially to track down those who have left the ship more than a month since the beginning of the epidemic.

Many countries have come together to solve the logistical challenge of tracing people who were in close and long-term contact with the 29 people who washed ashore on St Helena, a remote southern Atlantic island, on April 24.

Two Britons are self-isolating in the UK because they may have been exposed to the virus before leaving nearly a month ago. Neither of them have symptoms.

The Ministry of Defense (MoD) said a specialist army team and medical personnel were parachuted into the British overseas territory of Tristan da Cunha along with medical aid and equipment after a British national landed on their island with a suspected case of hantavirus.

Experts in many countries are trying to solve the mystery of how the virus, which originated in rats and mice, infected the MV Hondius and spread to so many people.

The first patient, a 70-year-old Dutchman, died on April 11; His 69-year-old wife also fell ill later. He died on arrival at the emergency department of a Johannesburg hospital on 26 April.

On May 2, a German passenger on the ship also died after testing positive for the virus.