A potential hantavirus contact case surfaced in Brittany, France, on Tuesday morning, the first sign that the virus tied to the ill-fated MV Hondius cruise ship may have jumped beyond the passengers who were actually on board. The individual, identified in the port city of Concarneau, was transferred to the University Hospital of Rennes for further testing, as health authorities across at least half a dozen countries scramble to track, quarantine, and monitor more than 120 evacuees who fanned out from the Canary Islands over the weekend.
The question now is whether the Andes strain of hantavirus, a pathogen historically linked to rodent exposure in South America, will produce a third wave of human-to-human infections. Dr. Steven Quay, an expert tracking the outbreak, told the Daily Mail that generation-two cases, those who caught the virus from patient zero, took an average of 22 days to become sick. If the same incubation period holds, generation-three cases could start appearing around May 19.
That date is days away. And the passengers who might carry the virus are already home.
The outbreak traces back to Leo Schilperoord, a 70-year-old Dutch national identified as patient zero. His wife, 69-year-old Miriam Schilperoord, disembarked from the Hondius on Saint Helena on April 24 along with 28 other passengers. The next day she boarded an Airlink flight to Johannesburg carrying 82 passengers and six crew. She briefly boarded a second flight bound for Amsterdam before being asked to exit. On April 26, Miriam Schilperoord died upon arrival at a Johannesburg hospital emergency department.
Three people in total have died after traveling on the Hondius. Two were confirmed to have contracted the virus. Health authorities are still trying to identify potential contact cases tied to the flights Miriam Schilperoord boarded, flights that carried dozens of people who had no idea they were sitting near a dying woman.
The dire conditions aboard the ship have been described by medical personnel, and the timeline of missed warnings only compounds the concern. Spanish health minister Javier Padilla explained why a French woman who had been coughing was not flagged as a potential hantavirus case before leaving the ship:
"They were not thinking that these symptoms were compatible with hantavirus. Why? Because what she was telling [them] was [that she had] an episode of coughing some days ago that had disappeared, and what she was having at that moment was kind of like stress or anxiety or nervousness. So it was not catalogued [as hantavirus]."
In other words, doctors from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the Spanish foreign health service dismissed her symptoms as stress. She later tested positive.
The evacuation of the MV Hondius sent passengers to at least seven countries, each adopting different health measures. Most followed World Health Organisation guidelines calling for a 42-day quarantine and constant monitoring of high-risk contacts. But the responses varied sharply.
In the Netherlands, 12 medical staff at the Radboudumc hospital in Nijmegen were quarantined for six weeks after workers failed to follow strict protocols while handling a hantavirus patient's blood and urine samples. The hospital had admitted a Hondius passenger on May 7. Bertine Lahuis, the hospital's executive board chair, acknowledged the lapse:
"We will carefully investigate the course of events to learn from this so that it can be prevented in the future."
That a trained hospital team in a modern European facility broke protocol handling samples from a known hantavirus patient tells you something about the difficulty of containing a pathogen that spreads through bodily fluids, and possibly through the air, as some experts have warned.
In Britain, some 20 citizens, one German resident of the UK, and one Japanese national arrived at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside, the same facility used six years ago to house Britons returning from Wuhan at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. They were told to remain for 72 hours, after which they could isolate for up to 45 days at home or another location.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said four French citizens repatriated from the ship had been "immediately placed in strict isolation until further notice."
In Spain, a Spaniard provisionally tested positive on Monday and was quarantining in a military hospital in Madrid. He was one of 14 evacuees there. The Spanish health ministry said Tuesday that the patient had developed a fever and breathing difficulties but was stable.
Eighteen passengers were repatriated to the United States. Sixteen of them, including one who tested positive, are at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre. Two others are in Atlanta. The Washington Examiner reported that HHS confirmed one American tested mildly PCR-positive for the Andes variant, and another had mild symptoms. Both were transported in biocontainment units.
Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said American passengers would not necessarily be quarantined, a notably lighter approach than the 42-day lockdowns imposed by European governments. On CNN, Bhattacharya stressed that the situation was serious but manageable, saying, "This is not COVID, Jake." The CDC has activated an emergency response, but the agency's posture has leaned toward reassurance rather than restriction.
Whether that approach proves wise depends entirely on what happens in the next few weeks.
Dr. Quay put the case count at 10: one apparent patient zero and nine generation-two cases. But the WHO had only officially confirmed seven cases among passengers. Breitbart reported the total had risen to 11, nine confirmed and two suspected, including a French woman evacuated to Paris whose doctors said she has life-threatening lung and heart problems and is on artificial lung support.
The discrepancy between the WHO's official count and the numbers reported by individual countries is itself a red flag. Just The News noted that WHO acknowledged one laboratory-confirmed case while five additional suspected cases remained under investigation, a figure that has since been overtaken by events.
If all patients contracted the disease from patient zero, the reproduction rate is nine, a staggering number for a virus that historically spreads through rodent droppings. In previous outbreaks in Argentina, the peak time for symptom onset ran 22 to 28 days. The WHO's earlier warnings about human-to-human spread now look less like caution and more like understatement.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appeared at a joint news conference in Madrid with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Tedros offered measured reassurance:
"This is not another Covid. And the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn't be scared, and they shouldn't panic."
But he also acknowledged the limits of that reassurance:
"But of course the situation could change, and given the long incubation period of the virus, it's possible we might see more cases in the coming weeks."
Sanchez, for his part, defended Spain's decision to allow the ship to anchor off the Canary Islands, saying the "world does not need more selfishness or more fear." Cape Verde, by contrast, refused to receive the vessel.
In Concarneau, Mayor Quentin Le Gaillard tried to tamp down alarm over the contact case identified Tuesday:
"For now, this remains only a contact case, a person who has been in contact with someone carrying the virus. So there is no need to panic, we are only talking about a single case which has been contained."
That language, "contained," "no need to panic", echoes what officials said about the ship itself before the case count tripled. Meanwhile, additional infections have been confirmed in evacuees whom officials had previously cleared as asymptomatic.
The MV Hondius itself set sail for the Netherlands late Monday evening with 25 crew, a doctor, and a nurse aboard. It is expected to arrive May 17. The crew includes 17 Filipino nationals, four Dutch, four Ukrainian, one Russian, and one Polish citizen.
Passengers who left the ship have scattered across continents. They were sent questionnaires asking whether they had been within six feet of an infected person for at least an hour cumulatively. Some may have come into contact with hundreds of people over the past two weeks. Professor Joseph Allen of Harvard said he was alarmed after a doctor onboard told him that messaging about close-contact transmission had been misguided.
Dr. Quay identified May 19 as the date to watch. If generation-three cases emerge, meaning people who caught the virus from generation-two patients, not from patient zero, it would confirm sustained human-to-human transmission beyond the ship. If May 19 passes quietly, the next focal date is June 21.
The world has been told not to panic. That advice may prove sound. But the people of Concarneau, Nijmegen, Johannesburg, and a dozen other cities did not sign up to be test cases for whether a cruise ship virus stays contained, and the officials asking for calm are the same ones who mistook hantavirus symptoms for stress.
