New York man quarantined in Omaha calls facility a prison

A 30-year-old man from New York State said the Omaha quarantine center where he and other passengers from the Hondius are being held feels like “prison,” a stark complaint as public health officials defend one of the country’s rarest medical confinement setups for a virus with a long incubation period.

The man, who asked not to be named because other passengers were harassing people, said he wants to quarantine at home instead of inside the National Quarantine Unit on the Nebraska Medical Center and University of Nebraska Medical Center campus. He said, “I’m held here involuntarily,” while adding that he and the other passengers understand the need to isolate and would comply if they could do so at home. He also said he was frustrated with “the bad faith way that they’ve handled this from the beginning.”

The 18 Americans who were on the Hondius were flown back to the United States and sent to Omaha for monitoring after the cruise ship became linked to an outbreak of Andes hantavirus that killed three people. Officials have kept the passengers for 42 days, the full incubation period for hantavirus, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the risk to the American public remained extremely low and that it was trying to use the least restrictive monitoring possible.

The ship had carried nearly 150 passengers on a sightseeing trip from southern Argentina to the Netherlands, a journey of about 8,500 miles that turned into a cross-border outbreak investigation. The first known death on board came on April 11, when a Dutch passenger died; his body was removed at St. Helena along with his wife, who later died after returning to the Netherlands. Another passenger, a German national, died on May 2.

The CDC said the outbreak was first reported to the World Health Organization on May 2 and that it deployed epidemiologists and medical professionals to the Canary Islands, with another team planned for Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha to help assess returning passengers. The WHO has said Andes virus is the only hantavirus known to spread in limited person-to-person transmission, which has sharpened the public-health response around cabinmates and spouses.

Nebraska Medicine says the National Quarantine Unit is the only federally funded quarantine unit in the United States, built to safely house and monitor people exposed to high-consequence infectious diseases. Nebraska Medicine has also said the passengers being monitored there are asymptomatic and well. By mid-May, health authorities had linked up to 11 cases to the ship as investigators continued tracing close-contact spread and weighing how much confinement is justified when the danger to the broader public remains low.