Five Australian residents and a New Zealander will be held in a COVID-era quarantine facility outside of Perth for three weeks, after potentially coming into contact with a deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Word of their return comes as American and French passengers repatriated from the ship have tested positive for the disease. None of the people returning to Australia has shown symptoms. Three people on board the cruise ship have died after contracting the disease.
Addressing a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Health Minister Mark Butler said the quarantine period would cover half of the potential six-week incubation period associated with the virus. The government will seek advice from the nation’s chief health officers throughout the quarantine period about extending the patient’s stay.
“I want to stress that our primary responsibility, obviously, is to keep our communities safe and healthy. We also have a responsibility for those patients, to bring them home and to protect them from any risk of potentially transmitting the virus without knowing it, and these arrangements discharge both of those responsibilities,” Butler said.
The Australian Health Protection Committee – which includes the Commonwealth, state and territory chief health officers – will order passengers to quarantine in the purpose-built facility that has remained vacant since the COVID pandemic.
The returning passengers include four Australian citizens and a permanent resident – three from New South Wales and two from Queensland – and a New Zealand citizen.
They will travel from Tenerife, on the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory off the Atlantic coast of Morocco, to an RAAF base north of Perth before being transferred to the nearby Bullsbrook Centre for National Resilience quarantine facility.
“These passengers will have to come home on quite a long flight from Tenerife, unlike travelling just to the UK, for example. Probably in a relatively small plane with a higher risk of transmission during transit than would be the case travelling from Tenerife,” Butler said.
“Obviously, they’ve been stuck on the ship for almost two weeks now, with this hanging over them, this has obviously been a really terrible situation for all of them, and my sympathy goes to them.”
In a late change on Monday in the Canary Islands (at about 9pm on Monday AEST) the Spanish government announced that the Australians and the New Zealander would depart Tenerife on an aircraft bound for the Netherlands, the last flight carrying the cruise ship passengers.
This appeared to replace an earlier plan for an aircraft chartered by the Australian government to collect the passengers in Tenerife.
Sources in Canberra confirmed that the aircraft – called an “Australian-supported flight” – would depart Tenerife at about 6.20pm on Monday (3.20am on Tuesday AEST) and would transit through The Netherlands and continue to Australia.
The journey to Australia is expected to take 48 hours and the details will be subject to health advice.
Butler said Australian staff assisting in the transportation of passengers would stick to “very clear protocols” regarding the use of personal protection equipment, and that he had “absolute confidence” in their ability to conduct the operation safely.
He said their return flights were a “complex operation” that required the participation of other countries, and plans were still being finalised.
Patients will be regularly tested for the virus; however, samples will need to be flown to Melbourne, the location of the only facility in the country able to process the tests.
Butler said the NSW and Queensland governments had been consulted on the return of cruise passengers to their states. Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls on Monday afternoon said passengers may be placed in further hospital quarantine upon arrival in the state after undergoing “psychosocial and physical wellbeing” checks.
News of the illness on the ship has revived fears of another breakout viral contagion, which both the World Health Organisation and the Australian government have quelled.
Hantaviruses are a family of viruses primarily spread through exposure to rodents or their faeces, and are not usually spread from person to person. Eight people aboard the MV Hondius have been infected with the disease, with six infections appearing to have been transmitted from two original patients.
Professor Ben Marais, the director of the Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases, said the Andes strain detected on the ship “has in the past shown to be more infectious” than other hantaviruses.
However, he said the infection risk remains low, and that hantavirus is “not nearly comparable to the COVID outbreak”.
Marais said if we continue to “do the basics well, this should not spread any further. But it’s a warning that these things are with us”.
The president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, initially attempted to prevent the ship from docking amid fears that passengers would remain on the island. He named Australia and the Netherlands as two nations not moving fast enough to repatriate their citizens. The Spanish government overturned his decision on Saturday night.
One of 17 American evacuees has tested positive for the virus, while a second has mild symptoms. A French traveller also began developing symptoms on their flight home.
Bullsbrook – a purpose built quarantining facility completed in 2022 at a cost of $400 million – has sat idle since its completion.
With David Crowe and wires
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Nick Newlingis a federal politics reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect viaXoremail.
