A plane carrying 20 UK citizens who were passengers on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak landed in Manchester, northwest England, on Sunday, television pictures showed.
The flight arrived at the city’s airport from Tenerife, where the MV Hondius is moored. The British nationals will be taken to a hospital near Liverpool, also in northwest England, for tests and will stay in quarantine for up to 72 hours.
According to information from the Spanish government, 22 British nationals were evacuated from the MV Hondius earlier, of whom 20 flew in on the special flight, according to Britain’s Press Association news agency.
PA said the other two were due to travel to another destination.
The British authorities were not able immediately to confirm those details.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, posting on X, said: “Thank you to all those who worked around the clock to get passengers from MV Hondius back to the UK by special flight this evening with public health protections in place.”
A spokesman for the National Health Service said on Saturday that the new arrivals would be taken for medical tests once they arrived at Arrowe Park Hospital in northwestern Wirral.
The group will initially stay for 72 hours, and arrangements for their further isolation assessed.
Since the start of the outbreak, three passengers from the ship — a Dutch husband and wife and a German woman — have died. Others have fallen sick with the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents.
The WHO said Friday it had confirmed six cases out of eight suspected ones.
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