MADRID — Spanish authorities on Friday were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew members on board a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health officials have said they will perform careful evacuations.
The vessel is expected to arrive Sunday at the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, and passengers will be taken to a “completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said the head of Spain’s emergency services, Virginia Barcones.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. have agreed to send planes to evacuate their citizens from the cruise ship.
While three people have died since the outbreak, and five passengers who left the ship are known to be infected with hantavirus, cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions said Thursday there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection on board the Dutch-flagged ship, the MV Hondius.
The World Health Organization considers the risk to the wider public from the outbreak as low.
On Friday, the WHO said a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger has tested negative for hantavirus. Her possible infection had raised concerns about the virus’s potential transmissibility.
The flight attendant’s negative result should ease concerns among the public, said Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesman. “The risk remains absolutely low,” he said. “This is not a new COVID.”
Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people. But the Andes virus detected in the cruise ship outbreak may be able to spread between people in rare cases. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.
Health authorities across four continents were continuing to track down and monitor more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly outbreak was detected. They were also scrambling to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
Countries scramble to track passengers who disembarked
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, Dutch officials and the ship’s operator said Thursday.
It wasn’t until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger, the WHO said.
The KLM flight attendant who tested negative for the virus was working on a flight headed from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25, and had later fallen ill. She was taken to an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday.
The cruise passenger briefly aboard that flight — a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship — was too ill to stay on the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.
The Dutch public health service is currently undertaking contact tracing on passengers from the flight who had contact with the ill woman before she left the plane.
On Friday, U.K. health authorities said a third British national who had been a passenger on the ship is suspected of being infected with hantavirus. The U.K. Health Security Agency said the person is on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the south Atlantic where the ship stopped in April. There was no word on the condition of the person.
Spanish health officials said Friday a woman in the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante has symptoms consistent with a hantavirus infection and is being tested.
She was a passenger on the same flight as the Dutch woman who died in Johannesburg after traveling on the cruise ship and contracting the virus, Secretary of State for Health Javier Padilla told reporters.
Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
Authorities in South Africa are working to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic to Johannesburg, the day after some passengers disembarked on the island.
Spanish authorities detail disembarkation plans
Officials sought to reassure the public in the Canary Islands about possible exposure to the virus among the general population.
Spanish officials said Friday that once the ship reaches Tenerife, passengers will be evacuated in small boats to buses only after their repatriation flights are ready to take them. Passengers will be transported in isolated and guarded vehicles, officials said, adding that the parts of the airport they travel through will be cordoned off.
Spain has requested medically equipped aircraft in case passengers report symptoms, Barcones said, in order to avoid any contact with the general population, but it wasn’t known if those would be available.
The U.S. agreed to send a plane to repatriate the 17 Americans on board the cruise ship. Those passengers will be quarantined at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine, the hospital said in a statement.
The dedicated biocontainment and quarantine unit in Omaha previously was used to treat Ebola patients and some of the first COVID-19 patients. Nebraska Medicine is one of a handful of hospitals in the U.S. with specialized treatment units for people with highly dangerous infectious diseases.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement Friday.
The British government also said it will charter a plane to evacuate the nearly two dozen British nationals onboard.
— Suman Naishadham
Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Molly Quell in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.