More than a dozen Americans who were aboard a cursed cruise ship hit by a rare, deadly hantavirus outbreak are being held at the country’s only federally funded quarantine center.
The passengers arrived early Monday morning on a flight from Tenerife, Spain, to Omaha, Nebraska, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services told The New York Times.
Two passengers—one who tested “mildly positive” for the hantavirus and who was experiencing mild symptoms—traveled in specialized biocontainment units, the Times reported.
After landing in Omaha, officials planned to transport the passenger who tested positive to another biocontainment unit.
The other 16 passengers were being transferred to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine.
The unit has 20 single-occupancy rooms with individual ventilation systems that continually expel air, according to the Times, and the passengers will be observed around the clock by a volunteer team of doctors and nurses.
Officials said it’s not clear how long they will need to remain there. The Daily Beast has reached out to HHS for comment.
Officials have determined that the MV Hondius, an Antarctic cruise, was hit by the Andes strain of hantavirus, a rare family of viruses carried by rodents.
Three passengers have died and five others have fallen ill, according to World Health Organization officials.
The fatalities include a 70-year-old Dutch passenger who died on April 11, followed weeks later by his 69-year-old wife, whose posthumous test later confirmed hantavirus infection. A third passenger, a German national, died on board in early May.
The ship docked Sunday off Spain’s Canary Islands, where the epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met the American passengers and conducted exposure risk assessments.
Seven Americans had also disembarked from the ship on April 24 and returned to the U.S. on commercial flights.
Health officials in Georgia, California, and Arizona are monitoring them, but officials have not alerted other travelers on their flights or attempted to trace their contacts, the CDC’s acting director Jay Bhattacharya told CNN on Sunday.
That’s because none of them had symptoms while they were traveling.
The Nebraska quarantine unit was activated in 2014 to receive U.S. citizens with the Ebola virus who had been medically evacuated from Africa, and in 2020, doctors there treated some of the first Americans diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the Times.
