Hantavirus: the 17 American passengers of MV Hondius will not necessarily be placed in quarantine

Not everyone will be staying at the same place. American passengers evacuated from the “MV Hondius” may not necessarily be quarantined, a senior US health official said on Sunday, urging the public to remain calm in a situation that “is not like Covid.”

The United States had announced on Friday that they would organize a repatriation flight for the 17 Americans aboard the ship where a hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These passengers, who are all asymptomatic, will be taken to a specialized center in the rural state of Nebraska, but may not necessarily be quarantined there, interim CDC director Jay Bhattacharya said on Sunday on CNN, the country’s main health agency.

Surveillance for several weeks

“We will question them and assess their level of risk,” to determine if “they have been in close contact with someone showing symptoms” or not, he said. After this assessment and based on the estimated risk, passengers will be offered “the possibility to stay in Nebraska if they wish or to return home if their family situation allows them to do so safely without exposing others along the way,” he added.

In both cases, passengers will be monitored for several weeks to ensure they do not develop symptoms, as is already the case for seven other Americans who left the ship earlier. According to the CDC, “people are typically only contagious when they have symptoms.”

This protocol matches those “followed during a 2018 epidemic of this exact strain of hantavirus” successfully contained, Bhattacharya added.

In France, the five passengers on the ship will be kept in the hospital for 72 hours during which several tests will be conducted, followed by 45 days of self-isolation at home, as reported by Le Parisien.

Responding to criticisms of the lack of communication from US health authorities on the matter, which has fueled global concern, six years after the Covid-19 pandemic, the official emphasized that the situations were incomparable. “If the level of risk had been higher, we would have obviously reacted differently,” he assured. And he reiterated: “This is not Covid. It will not lead to the kind of epidemic we have experienced.”