The fever ship was a constant dread in the days when Australia was only reachable by sea.
The yellow flag warning people to stay away was flown many times over the 152-year history of the North Head Quarantine Station. Some 600 people who died from epidemics of smallpox, bubonic plague, Spanish influenza and typhus are buried there.
Last week, a modern-day fever ship hove to on the horizon.
An outbreak of the rare but deadly hantavirus was identified on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius, and the world watched as the ship sailed around the Atlantic Ocean as authorities worked to address the potential medical emergency.
About 150 passengers – including four Australians, a permanent resident as well as a New Zealander – and crew were trapped on board for days as a political row threatened between the local Canary Islands, which wanted to block permission for the ship’s arrival on health grounds, and the central Spanish government, which intervened and overruled.
Hantaviruses are a family of viruses primarily spread through exposure to rodents or their faeces, and are not usually spread from person to person. The hantavirus patient zero was an American believed to have been infected while birdwatching in Argentina. Three people on board died after contracting the disease.
As passengers started being repatriated from Tenerife, word came that an American and a French woman from the ship had tested positive for the disease when they arrived home.
None of the people returning to Australia has shown symptoms. They and the New Zealander are expected to be flown to Western Australia and held in a COVID-era quarantine facility outside of Perth for three weeks.
For Sydneysiders, the MV Hondius evokes memories of the cruise ship Ruby Princess, which docked in Sydney with a cluster of COVID-19 cases on board in February 2020, a major source of the pandemic’s early spread in Australia.
With the MV Hondius offshore, the director-general of the World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reassured Tenerife residents that the virus was not another COVID. “I know you are worried. I know that when you hear the word ‘outbreak’ and watch a ship sail toward your shores, memories surface that none of us has fully put to rest. The pain of 2020 is still real, and I do not dismiss it for a single moment,” Tedros said in a statement. “But I need you to hear me clearly: This is not another COVID. The current public health risk from hantavirus remains low.”
Despite the reassurance, influencers and others on social media have seized on the hantavirus outbreak to revive disinformation that sowed distrust during COVID-19 times. “The conspiracy theories from COVID-19 never really died,” said University at Buffalo’s Yotam Ophir, who studies misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Assurances by Tedros and the steady hand of the Australian Health Protection Committee – which includes the Commonwealth, state and territory chief health officers – are our best bulwark against mindless panic and give confidence that the hantavirus outbreak is not the opening scene of a greater tragedy.
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