Dozens of passengers walked off a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship at the remote island of St. Helena in late April, days before health officials confirmed the deadly Andes strain was aboard, and flew home to at least twelve countries, triggering an international scramble to find them.
Three people are dead. At least five others have tested positive. And by the time anyone started tracing contacts, former passengers of the MV Hondius had already landed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Taiwan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and points beyond.
The World Health Organization confirmed that the cases involve the Andes variant, the only known strain of hantavirus capable of spreading person to person. That confirmation came after the ship had already been at sea for weeks, and after a significant number of passengers had disembarked and dispersed without warning.
Investigators believe the virus entered the ship through a Dutch couple in their late sixties. Argentine officials traced the likely exposure to a bird-watching excursion at a landfill site in Argentina, where rodent droppings carrying hantavirus are a known hazard. The couple boarded the MV Hondius afterward. Both are now dead.
The 69-year-old Dutch man died first, while the ship was still at sea. His wife attempted to fly home from St. Helena via Johannesburg on a KLM flight. KLM removed her from the aircraft before takeoff. She died shortly after. A KLM flight attendant who had contact with the woman was later admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam showing symptoms.
A 65-year-old German passenger died on May 2. One body still remains aboard the ship.
The MV Hondius docked at St. Helena between April 22 and 24. At that point, one passenger had already died onboard. Yet The US Sun reported that roughly 38 to 40 passengers left the ship during that stop, many without knowing they had been exposed to a lethal pathogen.
The ship's operator put the number at 29 disembarkations. Dutch authorities said it was closer to 40. An unnamed passenger still aboard the vessel told the Spanish newspaper El Pais a different figure entirely:
"There are 23 people wandering around there, and until three days ago, no one had contacted them."
The same passenger described where those travelers went:
"The Australian went back to Australia, the one from Taiwan to Taiwan, the Americans to all corners of North America. The Englishman to England, the Dutch to their homes... I don't remember the rest."
The discrepancy in the numbers, 23, 29, 38, roughly 40, is itself a red flag. When authorities cannot agree on how many people left a disease-stricken vessel, the contact-tracing effort that follows is built on sand.
AP News reported that health authorities in South Africa, Switzerland, Singapore, and St. Helena are now tracing and monitoring former passengers and their possible contacts. More than two dozen passengers from at least twelve countries left the ship on April 24, before the outbreak was confirmed and before any contact tracing was in place.
One Swiss-based passenger who flew home with his wife initially tested negative but later tested positive, consistent with hantavirus's incubation period, which can stretch up to eight weeks. He is being treated in Zurich.
Two British passengers who left the ship in St. Helena flew home via Johannesburg and are now self-isolating in the UK. Professor Robin May, chief scientific officer at the UK Health Security Agency, described the tracing effort as a "mammoth effort" and said authorities are "contact tracing everyone who might have been in close contact."
May also sought to tamp down alarm, stating that "this is not a virus that spreads easily between humans." WHO's Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud struck a similar note, saying, "We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries."
Those reassurances would carry more weight if the public health measures had been implemented before passengers scattered across a dozen time zones.
The MV Hondius was steaming toward the Canary Islands and due to dock in Tenerife over the weekend. Asymptomatic passengers still aboard will be tested on arrival before being sent home to their respective countries. Some may face quarantine lasting up to eight weeks, a reflection of the virus's long incubation window.
The Washington Examiner reported that WHO has now confirmed eight total cases of Andes-strain hantavirus linked to the ship, with five deaths. Health officials coordinating the controlled disembarkation in the Canary Islands stressed that hantavirus does not pose a pandemic-level threat comparable to COVID-19.
Martin Anstee, a 56-year-old former police officer working as an expedition leader on the cruise, was among those medically evacuated. He was airlifted alongside a 41-year-old Dutch doctor and the 65-year-old German who later died. Anstee is now in isolation at a hospital in the Netherlands.
Speaking from his hospital bed, Anstee told Sky News:
"I'm doing OK. I'm not feeling too bad. There are still lots of tests to be done. I have no idea how long I'll be in the hospital for. I'm in isolation at the moment."
His wife Nicola told The Telegraph that "it has been a very traumatic few days," adding: "The fear with this virus is it can deteriorate very quickly. I don't believe he's in imminent danger now, but it was horrible."
Earlier in the crisis, the ship was stranded off Cape Verde with 149 people aboard after the first three deaths raised suspicion of a serious outbreak.
The core failure here is not the virus itself. Hantavirus is rare. Person-to-person transmission, even with the Andes strain, requires close contact. The core failure is the gap between the first death and the first act of containment.
A passenger died aboard the MV Hondius before the ship reached St. Helena. The ship docked anyway. Passengers disembarked anyway. They boarded commercial flights to multiple continents, anyway. No one told them what they might be carrying.
The ship's operator has not confirmed where all of the departed passengers are now. The New York Post reported that at least 23 passengers returned to countries including the United States before many were informed of their exposure. Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, noted that the Andes strain "requires large saliva droplets from talking to people. Close, person-to-person spread."
That is reassuring in theory. In practice, a cruise ship is a floating incubator of exactly that kind of close contact, shared dining rooms, narrow corridors, group excursions, confined cabins.
WHO officials have said the risk to the general public remains low. But "low risk" is a statistical statement. It is cold comfort to the families of the five people already dead, or to the flight attendant hospitalized in Amsterdam, or to the passengers now waiting out an eight-week incubation window wondering whether they drew the short straw.
As the ship made its way toward the Canary Islands, WHO had already warned that human-to-human spread could not be ruled out aboard the vessel, a warning that arrived well after the window to contain the exposure had closed.
Several questions remain unanswered. Why did the ship dock and allow disembarkation after a passenger death? Who made that call? Why did it take days, by the unnamed passenger's account, at least three, before departed travelers were contacted? And why can't the operator and Dutch authorities agree on how many people left?
These are not academic questions. They are the difference between a contained incident and an international contact-tracing nightmare spanning twelve or more countries.
The MV Hondius eventually departed Cape Verde for the Canary Islands with roughly 140 people still aboard, but the harder problem was never the people who stayed on the ship. It was always the ones who got off.
When a deadly virus is aboard and the first response is to open the gangway, no amount of contact tracing after the fact can undo the decision. The reassurances sound reasonable. The timeline does not.
