2 test positive as evacuation of virus-hit cruise ship nears completion
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 yesterday 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 yesterday.
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 were set to be evacuated yesterday 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.
Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia told a press conference late on Sunday that a plane left the Netherlands yesterday with 18 passengers from countries which did not send their own repatriation aircraft.
A second and final flight departed for Australia yesterday 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 refueling 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.
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. –Reuters
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