Australia to fly citizens home from virus-hit cruise ship, plans quarantine

SYDNEY – Australia will charter a flight to evacuate its citizens from a Dutch-flagged luxury cruise ship hit by a deadly strain of hantavirus, with the passengers to be quarantined after they arrive in Australia.

Eight people no longer on the MV Hondius have fallen ill, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) tally from May 8, of which six are confirmed to have contracted the virus. Three have died, a Dutch couple and a German.

Environment Minister Murray Watt said four Australians, one resident of Tenerife and one resident of New Zealand will be repatriated.

“This is being done via an Australian government-supported flight, and we expect those people to return to Australia soon,” Mr Watt told reporters in Canberra.

Health Minister Mark Butler told a news conference the returning passengers will be quarantined at a facility in Western Australia for a minimum of three weeks.

“I want to stress that our primary responsibility as a government, obviously, is to keep our community safe and healthy,” he said.

“We also have a responsibility to those passengers, to bring them home and to protect them from any risk, no matter how small, of potentially transmitting the virus without knowing it.”

New Zealand’s Director of Public Health Corina Grey said in a statement on May 11 that New Zealand’s health services have the capacity to support any quarantine measures if required.

Spain, France and the United States have evacuated their citizens from the MV Hondius, which has anchored near Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, officials said. One American has tested mildly positive to the virus, while another has mild symptoms.

Spain’s health minister said the final two flights to evacuate passengers, one flight from Australia and another from the Netherlands, would depart in the afternoon of May 11.

The WHO has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers, though global health experts have urged calm, reminding a public scarred from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic that this virus is far less contagious and poses little risk to the general population.

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 died.

After the outbreak was detected, the vessel left for Spain on May 6 from the coast of Cape Verde. It sailed from the southern tip of Argentina across the southern Atlantic and up to the Cape Verde islands. REUTERS