Government jet leaves Tenerife with two Irish passengers who were on hantavirus-hit cruise ship

LAST UPDATE | 2 hrs ago

THE GOVERNMENT JET has left Tenerife with two Irish people who were on board a cruise ship struck by hantavirus.

The two were among nearly 150 people on board the ship.

They will arrive home this evening, accompanied by HSE medics, the Department of Health confirmed.

Minister Jack Chambers said once the two return to Ireland, they will then isolate and quarantine for five weeks. He said the two remain asymptomatic.

“I understand they are safe and well and haven’t any symptoms, but are following strict protocols when they return to Ireland, to protect broader public health,” he told RTÉ’s This Week programme. 

The Department of Health said the Irish passengers will be transferred to an HSE facility to quarantine when they arrive home, adding that they will be actively monitored.

“If they become symptomatic, they will be assessed and treated as appropriate,” the department said.

In Tenerife, work evacuating passengers and crew members from the cruise ship began this morning.

Passengers wearing blue medical suits began disembarking the Dutch-flagged vessel onto smaller boats to reach the port of Granadilla on Tenerife, journalists for news agency AFP saw.

The evacuees then boarded a red Spanish army bus and travelled to Tenerife South airport in a convoy, with a protective board separating the driver from the passengers.

The evacuees changed into new protective equipment before boarding their repatriation flights, the first of which took 14 Spaniards to Madrid, where they will observe quarantine at a military hospital.

“Everything is going well,” French evacuee Roland Seitre told AFP just before taking off, saying “everyone was great” during the disembarkation.

A plane bound for the Netherlands was taking 27 people, including Belgian, Greek, German, Guatemalan and Argentine citizens, Spanish civil protection chief Virginia Barcones told public broadcaster RTVE.

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“The last flight of the entire procedure is scheduled for tomorrow, which is the flight to Australia,” Garcia said.

As well as the flight for the two Irish people, she said, flights for Canadian, Turkish, French, British and US citizens are also planned for today.

Three passengers from the ship – a Dutch husband and wife and a German woman – have died, while others have fallen sick with the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents.

The Andes strain of hantavirus, the only strain that can transmit from person to person, has been confirmed among those who have tested positive, fuelling international concern.

“We classify everybody on board as what we call a high-risk contact,” WHO’s epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention director Maria Van Kerkhove said yesterday.

But the risk to the general public and the people of the Canaries remained low, she added.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who arrived in Spain on Saturday and is expected to oversee the ship evacuation, gave the same assurance and thanked the people of Tenerife for their solidarity.

In an open letter to the people of Tenerife, he wrote: “I need you to hear me clearly. This is not another Covid.”

After arriving on the island, he said he was confident the operation would be a success. “Spain is ready and prepared,” he told reporters.

Daily life uninterrupted

At the port of Granadilla de Abona early this morning, white tents were sent up along the quay and the police had secured part of the port.

Despite the situation, daily life appeared largely normal: some people were swimming, others shopping at the market or sitting at café terraces.

“There are worries there could be a danger, but honestly I don’t see people being very concerned,” said David Parada, a lottery vendor.

Regional authorities have refused to allow the vessel to dock. Instead, it will remain offshore while passengers are screened and evacuated between today and Monday – the only window health officials say the weather will allow.

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The WHO said Friday it had confirmed six cases out of eight suspected ones. There are no suspected cases remaining on the ship.

The MV Hondius is sailing from Cape Verde, where three infected people had already been evacuated earlier in the week.

Tracking and tracing

In Madrid, Spain’s health and interior ministers insisted there would be “no contact” with the local population, and that passengers would leave “by nationality groups”.

“All areas (the passengers) pass through will be sealed off,” the interior minister said, adding a maritime exclusion zone would be in force around the vessel.

The MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina on 1 April for a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Verde.

Provincial health official Juan Petrina said there was an “almost zero chance” the Dutch man linked to the outbreak contracted the disease in Ushuaia based on the virus’s incubation period, among other factors.

Health authorities in several countries have been tracking passengers who had already disembarked and anyone who may have come into contact with them.

A flight attendant on the Dutch airline KLM, who came into contact with an infected passenger from the cruise ship and later showed mild symptoms, tested negative for hantavirus, the WHO said on Friday.

The passenger – the wife of the first person to die in the outbreak – had briefly been on a plane bound from Johannesburg to the Netherlands on 25 April, but was removed before take-off.

She died the following day in a Johannesburg hospital.

Spanish authorities said a woman on that flight was being tested for hantavirus, having developed symptoms at home in eastern Spain. She is in isolation in hospital, said health secretary Javier Padilla.

Two Singapore residents who had been on the ship tested negative for the disease but would remain in quarantine, the city state’s authorities said on Friday.

British health authorities also said on Friday there was a suspected case on Tristan da Cunha, one of the world’s most isolated settlements with around 220 people.

With reporting from © AFP 2026  and Emma Hickey

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