In a positive update on Sunday, authorities said that passengers and crew disembarked from the cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak, and are being evacuated to their home countries. They will be isolated there according to national protocols to prevent further spread of the disease. The passengers will be tested upon arrival and then either taken to local hospitals or quarantine facilities or transported home for isolation. This comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers from the boat from Sunday.
However, the CDC and WHO were forced to address fears of another COVID-like pandemic. Centers for Disease Control Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya, during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, explained why the MV Hondius outbreak should not concern locals.
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Why Hantavirus will not be a COVID-like pandemic
“This is not COVID, Jake, and we don’t want to treat it like COVID,” Bhattacharya told Tapper on Sunday. Seventeen American passengers are expected to return to US soil in the coming days after disembarking from the MV Hondius in Tenerife.
Authorities said the Americans will be transported to Nebraska’s National Quarantine Unit for medical assessments and monitoring. Officials stressed the operation is being handled under strict containment protocols, with no public interaction expected during the transfer process.
A total of 147 passengers had been onboard the vessel.
Bhattacharya repeatedly emphasized that the current outbreak does not resemble the early stages of COVID-19 and said existing hantavirus containment procedures have already proven effective in past incidents.
“We don’t want to cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols that we – that, again, were successful in containing outbreaks in the past. And so we followed those protocols,” he noted.
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“This health alert is coming up because, again, there’s this discrete event of the 17 arriving in the United States very, very soon. And so we just want to make sure that the medical community understands this.”
“The key message I want to send to your audience is that this is not COVID. This is not going to lead to [that] kind of outbreak.”
Officials explain why transmission risk remains low
According to Bhattacharya, hantavirus remains difficult to spread between humans, especially when infected individuals are asymptomatic.
“In this case, risk doesn’t mean the risk of dying…The risk is a high risk if they have been in close contact with somebody who was symptomatic,” he explained.
“If they weren’t in close contact with someone who was symptomatic, then we’re going to deem them a low risk. If they were in close contact, we’re going to deem them a medium or high risk.”
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The acting CDC director also noted that seven Americans who had previously returned home from the ship weeks earlier were not showing symptoms and therefore posed no transmission threat.
“If they don’t have symptoms, they’re not at risk of exposing others,” he said.
‘This is not COVID’
The virus, usually spread by 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 fell ill and was taken into intensive care, 21 days after another passenger had died.
The man’s health has since improved, a WHO official said on Sunday.
The WHO said the first passenger who died on the ship may have been infected before boarding, possibly during travel in Argentina and Chile.
Eight people no longer on the ship have fallen ill, according to a WHO tally from Friday, of which six are confirmed to have contracted the virus. Three have died – a Dutch couple and a German national.
Four remain hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland. On the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory, a suspected case is being treated by a team of medical specialists parachuted in by the UK military.
(With inputs from Reuters)
