Plane with U.K. citizens from hantavirus ship lands in Manchester

A plane carrying 20 U.K. citizens who were passengers on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak landed in Manchester, northwest England, on Sunday (May 10, 2026), 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.

A British official said 20 of them had flown in on the special flight to Manchester. The other two did not live in Britain and would be travelling to their countries of residence.

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 U.K. by special flight this evening with public health protections in place.”

A spokesman for the National Health Service said on Saturday (May 10, 2026) that the new arrivals would be taken for medical tests once they arrived at Arrowe Park Hospital, near Liverpool.

The group will initially stay for 72 hours, and arrangements for their further isolation will be 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 on Friday (May 8, 2026) it had confirmed six cases out of eight suspected ones.