Cruise ship passenger making best of quarantine in US following hantavirus outbreak

When Jake Rosmarin boarded the MV Hondius, he gleefully posted on social media that the ship would be his home for 35 days as he traveled across the South Atlantic.

Now, he is one of 18 Americans under observation at specialized health care facilities designed to treat people with dangerous infectious diseases after three people died and others were sickened by a hantavirus outbreak aboard the ship.

Rosmarin, 30, said he expects to spend 42 days at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Fourteen other American passengers from the ship are also there. Another who tested positive for the virus is in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. Two were being monitored in the serious communicable disease unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.

Public health officials have said the risk of the virus spreading from passengers into the general public is very low and that healthy people are being quarantined as a precaution.

Rosmarin, a content creator and photographer from Boston, told The Associated Press he intends to make the best of his isolation.

His room is more like a small hotel suite. He has a closet, smart TV, bathroom, small refrigerator, bed, chair and stationary bike. He has windows, but he keeps the blinds closed from peering media.

“It’s a very nice room,” Rosmarin said. “I already ordered a mattress pad, new pillows. I think, for now, my plan is to take it one day at a time and that’s the best I can do.”

On Tuesday, he received a special treat which he posted to social media.

Nurses at the facility brought him to an iced Horchata with oak milk and vanilla cold foam. “This is everything I needed, right now. Wow!” Rosmarin said into the camera.

Life in quarantine

Hantavirus usually spreads from rodent droppings and is not easily transmitted between people. But the Andes virus detected in the cruise ship outbreak may be able to spread between people in rare cases. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.

“I never got sick,” Rosmarin said Tuesday.

Eleven people who were aboard the MV Hondius fell ill, with at least nine confirmed cases. Three people on the cruise died, including a Dutch couple that health officials believe were the first exposed to the virus while visiting South America.

The last remaining passengers on the ship disembarked Monday and boarded flights to more than 20 countries to enter quarantine.

The quarantine and biocontainment units in Omaha are specialized facilities created to monitor people exposed to serious illnesses. The biocontainment unit is used for treating people who are ill with highly infectious diseases.

Outside of doctors, who wear full personal protection equipment that include gowns and masks when they come into his room, Rosmarin can’t receive visitors. Most nurses don’t come into his room even when it is time for meals.

“I open the door with a mask on and they kind of put the food toward me and I grab it on the tray,” he said.

Once people began to get sick on the ship, passengers were also advised to stay in their cabins as much as possible.

“I left the cabin about 15 minutes each day to refill my water, get fresh air and grab food for breakfast and lunch,” he said, adding that passengers practiced social distancing and masked up.

Penguins, seals and albatross

Rosmarin began traveling the world in 2022 after quitting his job as a media buyer. He has an influencer partnership with the ship’s operator. The company covered the cost of his trip, which included stops at remote islands in the South Atlantic, including South Georgia Island.

“We saw a King penguin colony — the largest in the world, 300,000 to 500,000,” Rosmarin said. “We got to see Gentoo penguins, fur seals, elephant seals, Chinstrap penguins, albatross.”

Rosmarin described the MV Hondius as an expedition vessel and not a cruise ship. Since passengers and crew would be disembarking on islands, some with fragile ecosystems, biosecurity measures were in place, he said.

“An expedition vessel is much cleaner than any cruise ship you’re ever going to go on,” Rosmarin added. “For South Georgia, there were the strictest biosecurity measures. We have to sit down in the lounge pulling fuzz out of our jackets. A little pebble in your shoe, it needs to come out.”

Those precautions, though, were meant to protect the environment from passengers, rather than the other way around.

His planned trip of five weeks stretched to six because he couldn’t get off the ship once the outbreak was discovered.

“We didn’t really know it was the hantavirus until the night we were supposed to disembark,” Rosmarin said.

Waiting for Rosmarin back home in Boston is his fiance. The couple plans to marry next year. “I think he tried to be calm for me, but I think he was also very scared,” Rosmarin said Tuesday.

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Associated Press writer Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.