French Passenger Develops Symptoms Amid MV Hondius Hantavirus Evacuation

A French national repatriated from the MV Hondius developed symptoms during the flight home from Tenerife on Sunday—the first reported symptomatic case among the cruise ship's evacuees. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated that all five French passengers on the flight were placed in strict isolation upon landing at Le Bourget airport outside Paris.

The MV Hondius arrived off the coast of Tenerife, one of Spain's Canary Islands, early Sunday morning local time. Passengers are being transferred by smaller boats to the Port of Granadilla, then taken in sealed-off buses to the airport for repatriation flights. By midafternoon Sunday, more than 70 evacuees had departed Tenerife on flights to Spain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, the U.K., Ireland, and Turkey, with U.S. and Australian flights still pending, according to Spain's Health Ministry.

As of Friday, six people had been confirmed as infected with hantavirus, and four are hospitalized, according to the World Health Organization. Three people have died: a Dutch couple and a German national.

Health authorities from a dozen countries, including the U.S., are working to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked on April 24 on the island of St. Helena, a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, without contact tracing, nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on board.

Health officials in Arizona, California, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia are monitoring residents for potential infections linked to the cruise ship. New Jersey was the latest state to announce it was tracking residents. No U.S. cases have been reported.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a Health Alert Network advisory on Friday, alerting doctors and state health departments to be aware of potential imported hantavirus cases. The CDC has classified the outbreak as a Level 3 emergency response, the lowest level of emergency activation, and has deployed teams to the Canary Islands and to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where the 17 American passengers will be taken to the National Quarantine Center at the University of Nebraska after they are repatriated.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday that the leading theory explaining how the virus reached the ship could be traced back to the first two cases—a Dutch couple—who had traveled through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay on a birdwatching trip "which included visits to sites where the species of rat known to carry the virus was present." Tedros, who traveled to Tenerife to oversee the evacuation, told reporters Sunday after the first plane departed that "the risk to the public is low... they shouldn't be scared and they shouldn't panic."

Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the WHO, urged people not to panic, saying at a Thursday press briefing: "This is not COVID, this is not influenza; it spreads very, very differently."