The operation used planes chartered by several countries and the European Union, under the European Civil Protection Mechanism.
The last two flights to repatriate passengers and crew from the ship where a Hantavirus outbreak occurred landed in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, on Monday night.
The two aircraft, which departed from the Spanish Canary archipelago, were carrying a total of 28 people, according to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On board the first plane were six former passengers from the MV Hondius – four Australians, a New Zealander and a British citizen residing in Australia – who will be housed in a quarantine center next to the airport before leaving for Australia.
Dressed in white medical gowns and wearing masks, passengers disembarked from the medical plane, carrying white bags with their belongings, before entering the terminal.
The second aircraft carried 19 of the ship’s crew, a British doctor, an epidemiologist from the World Health Organization (WHO) and another from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
The ship MV Hondius left the Spanish island of Tenerife on Monday bound for Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where it will dock to be disinfected.
The vessel also has 25 crew members and two healthcare professionals on board, as well as the body of a German passenger who died during the cruise.
The European Commission said on Monday that it carried out six passenger repatriation flights, carried out by France, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece and Ireland.
The operation used planes chartered by several countries and the European Union, under the European Civil Protection Mechanism.
Spain’s government said on Sunday that 125 people of more than 20 nationalities who were on the boat with hantavirus had been disembarked and repatriated to the Canary Islands and had completed the operation.
The operation was coordinated by Spain, the Netherlands, the WHO, the ECDC and other European Union bodies.
The ECDC admitted on Sunday that more cases of hantavirus infection could emerge in the coming weeks among former passengers and crew of the ship, due to the uncertainties that still persist about the outbreak and the long incubation period.
According to him, the genetic sequencing of the virus “strongly suggests” that the tested and confirmed passenger samples are linked to the same original source of infection.
“The genomic information also shows that the virus involved in the outbreak is similar to the Andean viruses already known to circulate in South America and is not a new variant”, highlighted the European center, which maintained the risk assessment as very low for the general population.
The WHO has so far confirmed six cases of hantavirus infection in people who traveled on the MV Hondius cruise ship, which left southern Argentina in early April. Three people died.
