Italy Clears All Four Hantavirus Quarantine Cases
Italy’s health ministry confirmed on Wednesday, May 13, that all four people placed under observation for possible hantavirus infection have tested negative, as governments across Europe and beyond raced to trace contacts from a deadly outbreak linked to a luxury polar cruise ship. The Italy health ministry confirmed that all four people tested negative for hantavirus infection. The four individuals — monitored across separate cities in Italy — were identified as potential close contacts of confirmed cases connected to the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged vessel that departed Argentina on April 1.
The news offered a moment of relief for Italian health authorities, though the broader outbreak remains active across more than a dozen countries. The bigger outbreak is still happening in, over 12 countries.
Tests were carried out at hospitals in Rome and Milan. The four people cleared included an Argentine tourist hospitalised with pneumonia in Messina, Sicily; a 25-year-old man from the southern Italian region of Calabria named Federico Amaretti, who had been in voluntary isolation at home; a 60-year-old British tourist held at Milan’s Luigi Sacco Hospital; and a travel companion of the British tourist, according to Italy’s health ministry and regional authorities.
“The risk connected with the virus remains very low in Europe and therefore also in Italy,” the health ministry said in a statement.
Italian Health Minister Orazio Schillaci separately told the newspaper La Repubblica on Wednesday that the government was “constantly monitoring the situation” and that risk levels remained low. “Anyone who says we’ve been at a standstill or are unprepared is lying,” he said.
The four in Italy had been placed under observation because each had been on or in contact with people from two separate KLM flights carrying passengers later linked to confirmed cases. The Argentine tourist had left Argentina on April 30 and flew to Rome before travelling onward to Sicily. The British tourist and his companion had been on a different flight that briefly carried the same Dutch woman who later died of the virus in South Africa. The four passengers initially placed under observation were on a KLM connecting flight from Johannesburg via Amsterdam to Rome on April 25, the same flight briefly boarded by that Dutch woman, according to The Local Italy.
Italy’s response protocol requires a mandatory 42-day quarantine for anyone classified as having had high-risk contact with a confirmed case — defined in part as sitting within two rows on a flight lasting six hours or more. Lower-risk contacts must monitor themselves for symptoms including fever, muscle pain, and headaches over the same period but do not need to isolate. The 42-day window reflects the longest known incubation period for the virus.
The ministry clarified that routine testing of asymptomatic contacts serves little purpose, since tests conducted during the incubation period can return false negatives.
Despite the negative results in Italy, the outbreak itself continued to widen. Spain reported its first confirmed domestic case on May 13, with one quarantined Spanish national testing positive for the virus, the country’s health ministry confirmed. Thirteen other Spaniards quarantined at a military hospital in Madrid again tested negative in new PCR rounds, health ministry official Javier Padilla told broadcaster TVE. One previously confirmed Spanish patient experienced breathing difficulties overnight but was reported as stable by Wednesday.
Across Italy and Spain combined, Reuters reported that 17 people under observation had tested negative as of Wednesday.
In France, Health Minister Rist said on Wednesday that she was awaiting the outcome of tests on 22 people placed in quarantine for having been in contact with someone carrying the virus. Arnaud Fontanet, head of Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases at the Pasteur Institute, told Reuters on Tuesday that the search for new cases could stretch on for months, given that the incubation period for each case runs up to six weeks. He added that, because the virus does not transmit easily, the total number of additional cases was unlikely to exceed a few dozen.
In the Netherlands, 12 staff members at the Radboudumc hospital in Nijmegen were placed in preventive quarantine for six weeks after blood and urine from a hantavirus patient were processed without following the strictest applicable protocols. “What happened is that strict procedures were followed, but not the very strictest procedures that apply in cases involving this hantavirus,” Dutch Health Minister Sophie Hermans told parliament. “The likelihood that staff have been infected as a result is small, but because we know we are dealing with a serious virus, the hospital has said, ‘we will play it safe.'”
In the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that a mildly symptomatic American passenger taken to Emory University’s biocontainment unit in Atlanta had tested negative for hantavirus. Sixteen other passengers being monitored at a National Quarantine Center in Omaha, Nebraska, remained asymptomatic. Health officials in nine states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas, Virginia, and Washington — were monitoring residents for potential exposure, with no confirmed cases in any of those states as of Wednesday, according to the CDC.
The MV Hondius departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 on a trans-Atlantic polar expedition. A cluster of severe respiratory illness was first reported to the World Health Organization on May 2. As of May 12, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported 11 total cases — nine confirmed and two probable — including three deaths. The three fatalities were a Dutch couple and a German national. A French woman was reported to be in a critical condition. The virus was identified as the Andes strain of hantavirus, the only known hantavirus capable of limited human-to-human transmission, which typically requires close and prolonged contact.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on May 10, while overseeing evacuation operations in Tenerife, that “this is not another COVID,” stressing that the public health risk remained low. “There is no sign that we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak,” he said, though he added that the situation could change given the length of the incubation period. On Monday, May 11, Tedros acknowledged that the WHO could not compel countries to follow its protocols. “We cannot force countries to take on our protocols; we can only advise and recommend,” he said at a press conference.
All passengers from the MV Hondius have since disembarked. A final group of six passengers — four Australians, one British national residing in Australia, and a New Zealander — left Tenerife on Monday after strong winds delayed their departure. Nineteen crew members and three treating doctors were also repatriated to the Netherlands. The vessel itself was due to sail to the Netherlands, its flag state, for disinfection with 26 crew members aboard.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for strong European coordination with the WHO, while the WHO has arranged for the shipment of 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries to strengthen testing capacity.
Italy’s health ministry is expected to continue daily monitoring of all contacts under its 42-day quarantine protocol. Italys health ministry wants to make sure everyone is safe and healthy, during this time. France is due to release results of tests on its 22 quarantined individuals in the coming days. The WHO has said it will update its risk assessment as new data emerges and has warned that additional cases may surface over the next several weeks due to the long incubation period. The MV Hondius is expected to arrive in the Netherlands for full disinfection, after which Dutch authorities are expected to publish a further epidemiological assessment.
