15 Cruise Passengers from Hantavirus Outbreak Quarantined at Nebraska Medical Center

Americans who were aboard a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus outbreak returned to the United States on Monday. Most of them went straight to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which houses specialized facilities for monitoring and treating people exposed to infectious diseases.

Fifteen passengers from the ship are now in the National Quarantine Unit on the university's Omaha campus, officials said Monday. That facility is the only federally funded one of its kind and saw its first use in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There is no place in the country that they could be better cared for more safely and more effectively," said Dr. Jeffrey Gold, president of the University of Nebraska, on Monday.

The medical center also operates the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit for anyone in quarantine who develops symptoms. Officials said one passenger from the ship moved there and is doing well.

Two other passengers went to a biocontainment facility at Emory University in Atlanta.

The National Quarantine Unit is built for healthy people who need monitoring, said Angela Hewlett, medical director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, on Monday. It has 20 single-occupancy rooms with no mingling among patients and no visitors except medical staff, according to Michael Wadman, medical director of the quarantine unit.

Staff check temperatures and watch for symptoms. Each room features individual negative air pressure systems and filters to block any virus spread, the university said.

The setup aims for comfort. Rooms include private bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi. Hewlett called it "much more like a hotel than a patient care space," since it lacks hospital equipment.

Anyone who gets sick in quarantine gets evaluated and transferred to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. "The biocontainment unit is a patient care space," Hewlett said. "That's where we provide hospital-based care to people who need it, and those patients could range from being relatively well and stable to critically ill, requiring multiple procedures and multiple interventions."

Its rooms use the same air systems and filters. "It's a very different facility compared to your routine patient care room in a regular hospital," Hewlett said.

Capacity depends on the virus and waste volume. "We typically can take 10 patients with an airborne disease," such as bird flu and coronaviruses, she said. For hantavirus, which can sicken people quickly, the unit handles two to three patients.

That limit explains why two went to Emory, officials said. If more need care than beds allow, patients could go to other U.S. centers.

Both units have handled infectious diseases before. The quarantine unit opened in 2020 for Americans evacuated from China, where COVID-19 started. The biocontainment unit treated some of the first U.S. COVID-19 cases and Ebola patients in 2014.