THE IRISH WOMAN who was trapped on the expedition cruise ship at the centre of the recent Hantavirus outbreak has spoken publicly about her experience for the first time.
Anne Lane (79) returned to Ireland six weeks ago but was in an isolation centre until Monday of this week.
Three people died following the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius in April, sparking an international health alert.
Speaking to Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ Radio 1 this morning, Lane, who worked as a personal assistant to former President of Ireland Mary Robinson for 28 years, and more recently for Labour leader Ivana Bacik, explained she has a love of adventure travel and was on the trip with a male friend.
For her, going on the MV Hondius was a “trip of a lifetime” because it covered so many different islands and climates, attracting many bird watchers.
Lane said she herself is not a bird watcher and that many of the bird watchers on the ship kept to themselves.
“The trip started on April the first, and on the 12th, there was an announcement that the captain wanted to address us, and in fact it was to tell us that a passenger had died during the night,” Lane explained.
She said a lot of the people on these sorts of trips are older, and so while it was upsetting to hear the man died, it didn’t seem unusual. When his wife died a few days later in hospital, Lane said most of the passengers thought she had maybe died of heart failure or shock.
Lane spoke of how, when a third person got sick, they still thought that it was just a coincidence and nothing out of the ordinary until the captain informed the remaining passengers that the man had tested positive for something called hantavirus.
“They said it’s not like Covid, it doesn’t travel as easily, so you know, don’t worry, you can separate from each other as much as possible,” Lane recalled.
At this point, about 90 passengers were left on the ship, and things continued in a normal way, with lectures continuing daily on the ship.
It was when they learned it was the Andean strain of the virus that the mood on the ship changed.
“They said there’s no cure, but you can treat the symptoms, and it has a 40% death rate,” Lane said.
“From my own point of view, I go, well, yeah, this is quite serious, but you know there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just motor on.”
She added: “‘I’m not prone to worrying until I specifically have something to worry about.”
It was only a few days later, when they were told the ship’s doctor, whom she had befriended, and another member of the ship’s staff were sick, that Lane began to worry.
She thought it was inevitable at this point that she and her friend would get the virus because they had spent so much time in the doctor’s company.
Around the same time, another passenger got sick and died within 48 hours.
“That was a big shock,” Lane said.
That evening Lane and her companion decided to watch Netflix in the cabin to take their minds off things.
“I said, oh, we’ll watch Hamnet, I haven’t seen it. The acting is absolutely superb, but it wasn’t a great film to see that evening,” Lane said.
Lane said the ship’s staff were “absolutely incredible” and kept things on board as normal as possible despite the mounting crisis and sense of emergency.
It was when they arrived at Cape Verde and weren’t allowed to get off the ship that panic really set in.
After finally being granted access to Cape Verde, they were taken from there to Tenerife, where the Irish government jet then collected Lane and the other Irish passenger to take them back to Ireland.
Upon landing in Ireland, they were taken straight to an isolation centre in North Dublin, where they remained for six weeks.
“You’re put into an apartment, you have everything you need there, every basic thing you need, and three meals are brought to you every day, and then we had blood tests every week,” Lane said, adding that she can’t believe she didn’t get the virus.
“I just cannot believe it,” she said.
Lane turns 80 in July and said she might go back to Antarctica next year to mark it.
She said small ships are “the safest places in the world” in the midst of a virus outbreak.