Hantavirus: The 17 American passengers of the MV Hondius will not necessarily be quarantined.

Not all will be housed under the same banner. American passengers evacuated from the “MV Hondius” may not necessarily be placed in quarantine, a senior American health official said Sunday, urging the public to remain calm in a situation that “is not like Covid.”

The United States had announced on Friday that they would organize a repatriation flight for the 17 Americans aboard the ship where a hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These passengers, who are all asymptomatic, will be transported to a specialized center in the rural state of Nebraska, but may not necessarily be placed in quarantine, interim CDC director Jay Bhattacharya said Sunday on CNN, the country’s main health agency.

Surveillance for several weeks

“We will question them and assess their level of risk,” to determine “if they have been in close contact with someone showing symptoms” or not, he said. “Based on this assessment and the estimated risk, passengers will be offered “the possibility of staying in Nebraska if they wish or returning home if their family situation allows them to return safely without exposing others along the way,” he added.

In both cases, passengers will remain under surveillance for several weeks to ensure they do not develop symptoms, as is already the case for seven other Americans who left the ship earlier. According to the CDC, “people are typically only contagious when they have symptoms.”

This protocol corresponds to those “followed during an epidemic in 2018 of this exact strain of hantavirus” successfully contained, added Jay Bhattacharya.

In France, the five passengers aboard the ship will be kept in the hospital for 72 hours during which several tests will be conducted, followed by 45 days of self-isolation at home, as reported by Le Parisien on Sunday.

Responding to criticism of the lack of communication from American health authorities on the subject, which has fueled global concern, six years after the Covid-19 pandemic, the official stressed that the situations were incomparable. “If the level of risk had been higher, we would have obviously reacted differently,” he assured. And he repeated: “This is not Covid. It will not lead to the kind of epidemic we have experienced.”