The MV Hondius docked at Granadilla on Tenerife shortly after dawn on Sunday, ending a tense five-week voyage from Ushuaia and beginning the methodical evacuation of the more than 140 people still on board. The first chartered jet — bound for a military hospital in Madrid — left the island within hours, carrying 13 Spanish passengers and one crew member into supervised quarantine.
Spain's Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization and the ship's operator Oceanwide Expeditions said in a joint statement that no one else among the remaining passengers and crew was showing symptoms of hantavirus. Six confirmed infections and two suspected cases have been recorded; three people, a Dutch couple and a German national, have died over the course of the voyage.
The ship was the first registered Polar Class 6 vessel in the world and was returning from Antarctic waters when the outbreak began. It departed Ushuaia in Argentina on April 1, left Cape Verde on Wednesday and held off the Canaries for two days while authorities prepared the port and the medical pathway.
Other passengers will leave by nationality through the week, on chartered flights coordinated with their home governments. Roughly 30 crew members are expected to remain aboard for the onward voyage to the Netherlands, where the ship is registered.
The WHO director-general, in remarks aimed squarely at Canarian residents who had voiced fears of a repeat of 2020, said the public-health risk was "low" and that "this is not another COVID". Local officials have nevertheless cordoned off the port's working zone and limited bystander access.
Two New Jersey residents who took an earlier Hondius cruise are also being monitored stateside, the New Jersey health department said this week, in coordination with the US Centers for Disease Control. None has shown symptoms.
Hantaviruses are typically contracted from rodent droppings rather than person-to-person, and the WHO has stressed that close-quarters maritime conditions, not airborne transmission, drove the outbreak's spread aboard. Investigators are still attempting to identify how the virus boarded the ship.