A deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic is unlikely to spread globally like the coronavirus did, even though the virus has a long incubation period and some of the ship’s passengers have already disembarked, World Health Organization officials said Thursday.
“This is not coronavirus. This is a very different virus. We know this virus. Hantavirus has been around for quite a while,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention.
“This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship,” she repeated.
The assurance came as officials confirmed that passengers from 12 countries, including the U.S., disembarked the MV Hondius cruise ship on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic before the virus was detected.
More than 100 people remain confined to their rooms on the ship, which was heading to the Canary Islands on Thursday.
State health officials in California, Georgia and Arizona have confirmed that they are monitoring residents of their states who were previously aboard the ship but have since returned home, The New York Times reported.
The WHO has identified the countries of origin of other people on the ship as Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the U.K.
The virus has a high mortality rate, and there have been three deaths among the eight confirmed or suspected cases as of Thursday. One British man remains in intensive care in South Africa, and two others are hospitalized in stable care, the WHO said.
Health officials believe the virus spread person-to-person on the ship after tests confirmed on Wednesday that the strain is the Andes virus. Officials said this kind of spread is rare for hantavirus but can occur with the Andes strain, and likely only happened because of the passengers’ close contact on the ship. The virus typically spreads from rodents.
Because the Andes virus has an incubation period of up to six weeks — meaning it could take over a month for someone to show symptoms and know they’re infected — WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “more cases may be reported.”
“WHO is aware of reports of other people with symptoms who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” he said. “While this is a serious incident, WHO assesses the public health risk as low.”
“We believe that this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity shown across all countries.”
– Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, WHO director for alert and response operations
Those affected with hantavirus symptoms include a flight attendant who the Dutch health ministry said was hospitalized this week in Amsterdam after having contact with a sick Dutch passenger who died from the virus. That flight attendant was reportedly being cared for in isolation.
All of the ship’s passengers are being advised to monitor themselves for symptoms of the virus. A step-by-step plan for what will happen once the ship docks is still being developed, said Van Kerkhove.
Additional guidance is expected in the next 24 hours. It may include isolation directions for confirmed cases and active monitoring of people known to have come in contact with the virus, said Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO’s director for alert and response operations.
“We believe that this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity shown across all countries,” said Mahamud. “We firmly believe that safe, informed contact tracing and monitoring will reduce further spread.”
Mahamud likened the current outbreak to a past Andes virus outbreak in Argentina, where the virus is endemic, in 2018-2019. In that incident, a symptomatic person attended a social gathering, resulting in 34 cases.
“We are in a similar situation right now: A cluster in a confined space with close contact. Does that mean that the rest of the world, the disease will spread? We had that outbreak in 2018 and it led only to 34 cases,” he said.
“So I just want to assure that if we follow public health measures, and the lessons we learned from Argentina is shared… we can break this chain of transmission and this doesn’t need to be a large epidemic,” he said.