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TENERIFE, Spain — The American passengers who were aboard the cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak are on evacuation flights en route to the U.S., the Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday night.
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All 17 American citizens aboard the MV Hondius are on their way home, officials said. Two are traveling in the plane’s biocontainment units “out of an abundance of caution,” the department said. One passenger has mild symptoms, and another “tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus,” HHS said in a statement.
The passengers are bound for the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine in Omaha. The flight will then take the passenger with mild symptoms to a second RESPTC site, according to HHS.
“Upon arrival at each facility, each individual will undergo clinical assessment and receive appropriate care and support based on their condition,” the agency said.
Omaha Mayor John W. Ewing Jr. said in a statement Sunday night that city officials have been briefed on the arrival of 16 of the passengers.
“We are confident in the quality of care that these individuals will receive along with the protocols to keep healthcare workers safe,” he said.
Spanish Health Ministry officials had earlier said a British national with U.S. citizenship was on the flight.
The passengers had boarded buses earlier Sunday evening for evacuation flights out of Spain.
Passengers started evacuating the cruise ship Sunday shortly after it arrived in Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands off West Africa. The first group of passengers, wearing masks and head-to-toe personal protective equipment, were kept strictly secluded from members of the public as a small boat brought them ashore.
A medical tent was set up ready to receive passengers in what is expected to be a two-day operation at the island’s Granadilla port, with buses on hand to take them to the airport, where countries have arranged special flights to take them home.
The first plane carrying 14 Spanish passengers left Tenerife on Sunday for the Spanish capital, Madrid, where they were taken to Gómez Ulla Hospital, Spanish Health Minister Mónica García said. Planes carrying French, Canadian and British passengers were also preparing to depart Sunday evening. The passengers will be hospitalized for monitoring upon repatriation.
The four Canadian passengers will be taken to a predetermined location in British Columbia, where they will self-isolate for at least 21 or up to 42 days if there is a need to extend, the country’s public health officials said.
The five French passengers will be monitored at a hospital for three days and sent to quarantine at home for 45 days, according to France’s foreign ministry. One of the French passengers had developed symptoms, and the necessary protocols will be implemented, García said at a news conference Sunday.
Six confirmed cases of hantavirus and two suspected cases have been linked to the outbreak on the ship, the World Health Organization said Friday. Three of those people have died, officials said, including two who died aboard the ship.
The ship is anchored offshore in the Canary Islands to enable the evacuation after Spanish officials overruled local leaders who had opposed the move, fearful of the infection risk and any potential economic hit to Tenerife’s tourism-dominated economy.
“The risk to the public is low,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters after the first plane departed. “So they shouldn’t be scared, and they shouldn’t panic.”
“Based on scientific assessment and based on evidence, the risk is low,” he added.
In their home countries, many will be taken to isolation facilities.
The WHO is recommending a long quarantine period. Diana Rojas, the head of high-impact diseases, said Sunday that “we cannot be sure that they will not develop symptoms until 42 days have passed.”
Garcia said passengers from the Netherlands were the next group to leave the vessel after Spanish citizens, with their plane also carrying German, Belgian and Greek passengers, as well as part of the crew.
Passengers from Turkey, France, the U.K. and the U.S. were then expected to be evacuated, followed by six people from “Australia, New Zealand and Asia,” she said, as part of the last flight planned for Monday.
Dr. Boris Pavlin, a WHO medical epidemiologist, told NBC News the operation had been “extremely efficient.”
Passengers have been coming off the ship on boats “in small numbers, placed on buses and spaced apart, just to make sure that — even though all of them are asymptomatic, they have no symptoms right now — that they don’t present any additional new risk to each other,” he said.
“This is not Covid,” he added. “In Covid, we’ve all been traumatized by how people you didn’t even think were sick were already spreading it, [but] we have no reason to believe that that’s happening here.”
The Dutch-owned ship, along with some crewmembers and the passengers’ luggage, will continue on the five-day journey to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, according to cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
The body of a person who died on board will also remain on the ship, which will undergo a disinfection process in the Netherlands, García said.
Health officials have stressed that the risk to the global population and to the residents of Tenerife, off western Africa, is low.
Hantavirus is typically contracted through contact with rodents, especially when people are exposed to their urine, droppings and saliva. The origins of the first case “suggest possible exposure to rodents during bird watching activities,” the WHO said.
Of the group of viruses, only the Andes — the strain in the Hondius case — is known to spread between people, but those people usually have very close contact with each other, according to the WHO.
On May 2, a month after the ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, “a cluster of passengers with severe respiratory illness” on board was reported to the WHO, the health organization said.
At that time, the ship had 147 passengers and crewmembers, but 34 passengers and crewmembers had previously disembarked, the WHO said.
The report came weeks after the first death, that of a Dutch man who died on board on April 11. At that point, “the cause of death was unknown and there was no evidence of a virus or contagion on board,” Oceanwide Expeditions has said.
His wife died at a South African clinic on April 26, the WHO said.
The third death, that of a German woman, happened on board on May 2, according to the WHO and Oceanwide Expeditions.
Two days later, hantavirus was confirmed in a passenger who had been medically evacuated to a hospital in South Africa, the company said.
Hantavirus can have a fatality rate of around 40% to 50%, the WHO says, and the elderly are particularly at risk. The average age of those aboard the ship is 65, it said.
Phil Helsel reported from Los Angeles, Freddie Clayton from London, Mirna Alsharif from New York and Mo Abbas and Daniele Hamamdjian from Tenerife.
Mirna Alsharif is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
Mirna Alsharif is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
Mo Abbas is a multimedia producer for NBC News based in London.
Daniele Hamamdjian is an NBC foreign correspondent based in London.
Freddie Clayton is a freelance journalist based in London.
Phil Helsel is a reporter for NBC News.
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