The cruise ship Hondius on the coast of Cape Verde.Image: imago
The cruise ship “Hondius” is approaching Tenerife, where port workers are threatening a strike. Meanwhile there is news from the WHO.
May 9, 2026, 10:49 amMay 9, 2026, 10:49 am
Matti Hartmann / t-online
The number of people who have tested positive for hantavirus rises to six. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced this late on Friday evening. There are also two suspected cases. Three of the previous patients died, including a woman from Germany.
Meanwhile, the polar cruise ship “Hondius” is approaching the Canary Islands. It is expected in Tenerife on Sunday morning.
The organizer Oceanwide Expeditions announced on Friday evening that planning for the arrival, including examinations and quarantine procedures, would be carried out by various organizations, including the WHO. The operator explained that no one on the “Hondius” was currently showing symptoms.
Protests in Tenerife
There is still growing concern on Tenerife that the outbreak could spread from the ship. Dock workers demonstrate and threaten to go on strike. “They want to send us a ship with people who are infected with a virus,” the “Bild” newspaper quoted one of the workers as saying. He is afraid of a lockdown and deaths. “It will be a disaster.”
The Tenerife Hotel and Restaurant Association meanwhile called on people to “keep calm and avoid unnecessary panic”. The WHO has repeatedly emphasized that the hantavirus outbreak is a serious development, but by no means the start of a pandemic. Hantaviruses are usually transmitted by infected rodents such as rats or mice. The current outbreak is about the so-called Andes type, in which human-to-human transmission has already been documented in individual cases in the past.
Virus sequenced in Switzerland
Virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit also sees no reason to panic. He told t-online that there was so far no reliable evidence that the virus could have mutated and become particularly contagious. Even after the virus was completely sequenced from blood samples of the patient treated in Switzerland, its assessment did not change. Schmidt-Chanasit told the Science Media Center Germany that there was no clear epidemiological evidence of a changed behavior of the virus.
The current risk assessment therefore remains: close, prolonged or unprotected contact with sick people should be assessed differently than fleeting everyday contacts. His conclusion: “Relevant contact persons should be actively monitored over several weeks due to the long incubation period.” However, he believes that a blanket quarantine of all people is “not automatically proportionate”.
No all-clear in Düsseldorf
The contact person of the dead Germans, who was isolated in the university hospital in Düsseldorf, has so far tested negative for the virus. The university hospital emphasized, however, that this did not mean the all-clear. The head of the tropical medicine department, senior physician Professor Dr. Torsten Feldt, explained: “We can only say that she currently has no active infection.”
The woman could definitely be infected, but still be within the incubation period. This usually lasts between two to four weeks, but there are also individual cases with an incubation period of up to eight weeks.