By Corina Pons and Leonardo Benassatto
SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Spain, May 11 (Reuters) – Two people have tested positive for hantavirus after being evacuated from a luxury cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak, health authorities said, as Spain prepared on Monday to evacuate and repatriate the last passengers remaining on the vessel.
A French passenger who was evacuated from the MV Hondius tested positive for the virus and her condition is deteriorating, French Health Minister Stephanie Rist said on Monday.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Sunday that one of the 17 Americans being repatriated had tested mildly positive for the Andes strain of the virus, while a second had shown mild symptoms.
The last 24 passengers still on board the MV Hondius are set to be evacuated on Monday afternoon from the cruise ship, now anchored near Spain’s Atlantic island of Tenerife, according to Spanish authorities coordinating the evacuations.
The move will cap a complex operation that has so far resulted in 94 people being evacuated and repatriated to their countries of residence, 41 days after the MV Hondius set off from southern Argentina and nine days after the first positive test result for the respiratory viral infection.
Three people have died since the start of the outbreak – a Dutch couple and a German national.
LAST FLIGHTS TO AUSTRALIA, NETHERLANDS
Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia told a press conference late on Sunday that a plane would leave for the Netherlands on Monday with 18 passengers from countries which did not send their own repatriation aircraft.
A second and final flight will depart for Australia around 6 p.m. local time (1700 GMT) on Monday with six passengers, Garcia said, including one from New Zealand and others hailing from unspecified Asian countries.
After the evacuations, the ship will sail for the Netherlands, its flag state, Garcia said, adding that around 30 crew members would remain on board. Reuters footage on Monday showed the ship refuelling at Tenerife’s port of Granadilla ahead of the voyage.
Once there and with everyone disembarked, including the deceased German national still in the ship’s onboard morgue, the vessel will be thoroughly disinfected.
‘THIS IS NOT COVID’
The MV Hondius was carrying 147 passengers and crew from 23 countries when a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses among passengers was first reported to the WHO on May 3.
By then, 34 other passengers had departed the vessel, which first sailed from Argentina in March with stops in the Antarctic and other locations before heading north to waters off Cape Verde west of the African continent. The vessel was briefly held there last week after news of the outbreak emerged.
The outbreak of the virus, usually spread by wild rodents but also transmittable person-to-person in rare cases of close contact, was first detected by health officials in Johannesburg on May 2 treating a British man who was taken into intensive care after disembarking the ship. That was some three weeks after the first passenger, the Dutchman, had died.
The luxury cruise ship left for Spain’s Canary Islands from the coast of Cape Verde on May 6 after Madrid agreed – at the request of both the WHO and the European Union – to manage the evacuation of passengers.
The WHO has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers from the boat from May 10, its director of epidemic and pandemic management, Maria Van Kerkhove, told a briefing.
Health officials have urged calm, reminding a public scarred from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that this virus is far less contagious and poses little risk to the general population.
“This is not COVID and we don’t want to treat it like COVID,” acting U.S. CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said in an interview with CNN on Sunday, adding that the 17 U.S. passengers from the ship would be given the choice of isolating at home or at a facility in Nebraska.
Spain’s health ministry also downplayed the risk to the broader population. It added that rodents had not been detected aboard the ship.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaus, Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and David Latona; Editing by Stephen Coates and Gareth Jones)
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