▶ Watch Video: Hantavirus cruise passengers to be evacuated to home countries, including Americans
World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus arrived in Tenerife Saturday to personally oversee the painstaking process of evacuating more than 100 people from a cruise ship dealing with an outbreak of the rare and deadly hantavirus.
Addressing the people of the Canary Islands, where the ship will anchor off the coast of its largest island, the WHO chief said the public’s concern is legitimate after what the world experienced in 2020 during the global coronavirus pandemic.
“This disease is not COVID,” Tedros said, reiterating a letter he wrote earlier Saturday. “The risk to the local population is low.”
Tedros said that the nature of the hantavirus is not the same as the coronavirus, but “that trauma is still in our minds.”
“That’s why also I came here,” he said. “To be on the side of the people because saying things from far could be easy. But I had to change my plans to come here because this is very, very important to the whole world and to the people of Tenerife as well.”
The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship is expected to arrive at the island of Tenerife early Sunday, officials said.
Eight people on the ship had confirmed or suspected cases of the hantavirus and three people have died, the WHO said on Friday. None of the 147 people currently on board, including 60 crew members, are symptomatic, according to Oceanwide Expeditions, which owns the vessel.
Tedros estimated Saturday that there will be six evacuation flights headed for the EU and four for non-EU countries.
There are 17 Americans on the MV Hondius, according to Oceanwide Expeditions, who will be taken off the ship in a small boat, taken to shore and immediately to a plane on the runway waiting for them. The plane, provided by the U.S. government with oversight from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will take the Americans to the National Quarantine Center at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, according to the CDC.
“I’m sure they’re very anxious to get home, but (we need) to make sure they do that in the most safe way possible,” Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s acting director of the Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention, said at a press conference on Saturday.
Each country with passengers on board the ship will proceed with a similar evacuation to awaiting planes, according to the Spanish Health Ministry.
The WHO said it was recommending each country keep the passengers removed from the ship in isolation for 42 days from the last point of exposure to the virus.
Chris McGrath / Getty Images
The disease is usually acquired through close contact with rodents, and is not transmissible from person to person. However, testing of those who were sickened on the Hondius has confirmed they have the Andes strain of the virus, the only variation that can be transmitted through close contact with a sick individual.
However, health experts say the chances of widespread transmission are very small.
“I know that when you hear the word ‘outbreak’ and watch a ship sail toward your shores, memories surface that none of us have fully put to rest,” Tedros said in the letter addressed to the people of the Canary Islands earlier Saturday. “The pain of 2020 is still real, and I do not dismiss it for a single moment. But I need you to hear me clearly: this is not another COVID.”
“The current public health risk from hantavirus remains low,” he continued. “My colleagues and I have said this unequivocally, and I will say it again to you now.”
The ship left Argentina on April 1 for a cruise stopping at several remote islands in the south Atlantic, including Tristan da Cunha and Saint Helena, both British territories.
The outbreak on the ship appears to have started with a Dutch couple who traveled around South America, the only place the Andes strain exists, in the months leading up to the cruise. The couple spent time bird-watching in areas where rodents are known to have tested positive for hantavirus, according to Oceanwide Expeditions.
The husband died on the ship April 11, while his wife was one of 32 people who disembarked the ship in Saint Helena, according to Oceanwide Expeditions. She would fly to South Africa and then die days later when she was removed from a KLM Airlines plane because she was too sick to fly, according to the airline.
Dozens of people on the plane or who disembarked at Saint Helena are already under observation around the world, including in the U.S. None of the people in the U.S. — in Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, New Jersey and California — are experiencing any symptoms of the virus, the state’s respective health departments have confirmed to CBS News.