Spain readies for evacuations as a hantavirus-hit cruise ship heads for the Canary Islands

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MADRID — Spanish authorities on Friday were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew members on board a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health officials have said they will perform careful evacuations.

The vessel is expected to reach the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, early Sunday.

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“They will arrive at a completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said Virginia Barcones, Spain’s head of emergency services, on Thursday.

The MV Hondius is a Dutch-flagged vessel and Dutch officials said Friday they were also in close contact with the ship’s owner and authorities of countries whose citizens are on board.

The United States has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate its 17 citizens from the cruise ship, Barcones said. The British government also said it will charter a plane to evacuate the nearly two dozen British citizens onboard.

At least three passengers have died, and several other people are sick. The World Health Organization considers the risk to the wider public from the outbreak as low, and confirmed Friday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger had tested negative.

Her possible infection had raised concerns about the virus’s potential transmissibility. Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesman, said Friday her negative result should alleviate panic.

“The risk remains absolutely low,” he said of the virus outbreak. “This is not a new COVID.”

Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people, but the Andes virus implicated in the cruise ship outbreak may be able to spread between people in rare cases. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.

Cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions said Thursday there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection on board the ship.

Countries scramble to track passengers who disembarked

Health authorities across four continents were continuing to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly outbreak was detected. They are also trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.

On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.

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It wasn’t until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger, the World Health Organization said.

The KLM flight attendant who tested negative for the virus was working on a flight headed from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25, and had later fallen ill. She was taken to an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday.

The cruise passenger briefly aboard that flight — a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship — was too ill to stay on the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.

The Dutch public health service is currently undertaking contract tracing on passengers from the flight who had contact with the ill woman before she left the plane.

On Friday, U.K. health authorities said a third British national is suspected to have the hantavirus.

The U.K. Health Security Agency said the suspected case is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the south Atlantic where the ship stopped in April.

There was no word on the person’s condition.

Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.

Authorities in South Africa are working to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic to Johannesburg, the day after some passengers disembarked on the island.

Spanish authorities reassure public

Spanish officials sought to reassure those with concerns about the evacuation of the MV Hondius in the Canary Islands.

Barcones said passengers would be evacuated from the ship only to go directly to the airport for their country of origin, and would travel in isolated and guarded vehicles. The parts of the airport they travel through will also be cordoned off, she said.

Still, some Spaniards drew parallels to the early months of 2020, despite the WHO and Spanish health experts stressing the low risk of the outbreak turning into something much bigger.

“The people of the Canary Islands, the men and women living there, can rest assured that there will be absolutely no possibility of contact at any time,” Barcones said.

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Suman Naishadham, The Associated Press

Associated Press writer Molly Quell in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed.