GRANADILLA DE ABONA, Spain — A coordinated, multi-country repatriation operation launched Sunday to bring home nearly 150 passengers and crew members from the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship impacted by a deadly hantavirus outbreak that has triggered international concern, after the vessel anchored off Spain’s Canary Islands.
Three people on the ship have already lost their lives to the rare disease: a Dutch couple and a German national, with multiple other passengers testing positive for the virus, which is most commonly carried and spread by wild rodents. Unlike many common infectious diseases, hantavirus has no approved vaccine and no targeted treatment. The outbreak traces its origin to Argentina, where the ship began its trans-Atlantic voyage back in April, a region where the pathogen is endemic.
Despite growing global attention to the incident, public health leaders have emphasized that the overall risk to global populations remains low, pushing back against unfounded comparisons to the far more transmissible Covid-19 pandemic.
Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia confirmed that repatriation efforts would extend through Monday, when the final chartered flight is scheduled to carry the last group of evacuees to Australia. On-the-ground reporting from Agence France-Presse correspondents documented the tightly controlled process: passengers clad in disposable blue medical protective suits disembarked the large cruise vessel via small transfer boats, which brought them to the Granadilla industrial port on the island of Tenerife. From the port, evacuees traveled in a sealed convoy of Spanish military buses to Tenerife South Airport, with impermeable protective barriers installed to separate passengers from the bus driver.
Before boarding their repatriation flights, all evacuees switched to new sets of personal protective equipment. The first flight carried 14 Spanish citizens to Madrid, where they will complete a required quarantine period at a military hospital. Speaking to AFP shortly before his departure, French evacuee Roland Seitre reported that the process had proceeded smoothly, noting that “everything is going well” and that all personnel involved in the disembarkation had been exceptionally helpful.
Virginia Barcones, head of Spain’s civil protection agency, told public broadcaster RTVE that a second flight bound for the Netherlands carried 27 evacuees of multiple nationalities, including citizens of Belgium, Greece, Germany, Guatemala, and Argentina. Additional chartered flights were arranged Sunday for passengers from Turkey, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States.
The operation is on a tight deadline: Canary Islands officials warned that all evacuations must be completed by Monday, when forecasted adverse weather conditions will force the empty vessel to leave its anchorage. Barcones confirmed that if the operation stays on schedule, the empty MV Hondius will set sail for the Netherlands at 7 p.m. local time Monday.
Regional authorities had initially refused to allow the ship to dock at a Canary Islands port, only granting permission for it to anchor offshore. However, Garcia confirmed that all remaining passengers are asymptomatic and passed a final rigorous medical screening before disembarkation began. Spanish officials have also stressed that at no point during the transfer and airport processing will evacuees come into contact with the local Tenerife population.
AFP reporters on site observed extensive security and infection control measures: white medical screening tents were erected along the port quay, and uniformed police, some in full protective medical gear, sealed off the section of the port being used for the operation. On Sunday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez defended the country’s response, saying “Spain is doing what it must do, with technical and scientific rigour and full transparency, with institutional loyalty and with international cooperation.”
International concern rose after it was confirmed that the variant of hantavirus detected on the ship is Andes virus, the only strain capable of human-to-human transmission. The World Health Organization (WHO) released an update Friday confirming that six cases have been confirmed out of eight initial suspected cases, with no remaining suspected cases on the vessel.
The MV Hondius reached its anchorage off Tenerife early Sunday after traveling from Cape Verde, where three already infected passengers were evacuated to Europe earlier this week. The vessel departed Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1 on a planned trans-Atlantic cruise bound for Cape Verde. The WHO’s current assessment is that the first infection occurred before the expedition departed, with subsequent secondary transmission between people onboard the ship.
That assessment has been disputed by Argentine provincial health official Juan Petrina, who argued that based on the virus’s multi-week incubation period and other key factors, there is an “almost zero chance” that the Dutch man identified as the initial index case contracted the virus in Ushuaia. Currently, health agencies across more than a dozen countries are conducting contact tracing for passengers who disembarked the cruise before the outbreak was identified, monitoring anyone who may have had close contact with infected individuals.
