Australia to fly citizens home from virus-hit cruise ship, plans quarantine

By Renju Jose and Lucy Craymer

SYDNEY/WELLINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) – Australia will charter a flight to evacuate its citizens from a Dutch-flagged luxury cruise ship linked to a deadly hantavirus ​outbreak, with returning passengers quarantined on arrival, the government said ‌on Monday.

Eight people no longer on the MV Hondius have fallen ill, according to a World Health Organization tally from Friday, of which six are confirmed to have contracted the virus. Three have died, a Dutch couple and a ‌German ​national.

Environment Minister Murray Watt said four Australians, ⁠one resident of Tenerife and ⁠one resident of New Zealand will be repatriated.

“This is being done via an Australian government-supported flight, and we expect those people to return to Australia soon,” Watt told reporters in Canberra.

Health ​Minister Mark Butler told a news conference the returning passengers will be quarantined at a facility in Western Australia for a minimum ⁠of three weeks.

“I want to stress ⁠that our primary responsibility as a government, obviously, is ​to keep our community safe and healthy,” he said.

“We also have ​a responsibility to those passengers, to bring them home and ‌to protect them from any risk, no matter how small, of potentially transmitting the virus without knowing it.”

New Zealand’s Director of Public Health Corina Grey said in a statement on Monday that the country’s ⁠health services had the capacity to support any quarantine measures if required.

Spain, France and the United States have evacuated their citizens from the MV ⁠Hondius, which has anchored ‌near Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, ⁠officials said. One U.S. citizen has tested positive ​to ‌the virus, while another has mild symptoms.

The WHO ​has recommended ⁠a 42-day quarantine for all passengers, while experts have urged calm, reminding a public scarred from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that this virus was far less contagious and posed little risk.

(Reporting by Renju Jose in Sydney and Lucy Craymer in Wellington; Editing by John Mair ​and Raju Gopalakrishnan)