The first passengers from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak arrived in their home countries on Sunday after evacuating from the vessel earlier in the day. 

The first group was seen wearing personal protective equipment, face masks, hazmat suits and respirators as a small boat brought them ashore around 9:30 a.m., before they were all taken to the Tenerife airport. Spain's health ministry said none of the first group to disembark exhibited symptoms of the virus.

Planes carrying Spanish and French nationals arrived in Madrid and Paris, respectively, on Sunday. A flight to the Netherlands—transporting citizens of Germany, Belgium and Greece—was scheduled to depart next, followed by flights to the U.K., Canada, Turkey, Ireland and the U.S. 

Thirty crew members will remain on board the ship as it sails back to the Netherlands for disinfection.

Since the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius departed from Argentina, six confirmed cases of hantavirus and two suspected cases have been linked to the outbreak on the ship, and three passengers have died.

The ship is anchored offshore in the Canary Islands, where passengers from different countries were being taken to Tenerife airport in military vehicles and sent to their respective home countries while avoiding contact with the public. When they get home, they will likely be taken to isolation facilities while medical staff monitor their health.

The virus is typically associated with rodents, but it may have passed from human to human aboard the vessel, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO officials said Sunday that the risk to the public remains “low,” even as the president of the Canary Islands opposed the ship’s docking, citing fear of infection risk and potential harm to the tourism economy.

“So they shouldn’t be scared and they shouldn’t panic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said of the public on Sunday. Officials added that quarantine must continue in each passenger's home country in order to ensure the disease does not spread.

“The Andes virus has a long incubation period and we cannot be sure that they will not have symptoms if they do not pass the 42 days,” Diana Rojas, head of high-impact diseases, told the media.

 U.S. states prepare for passengers

Seven U.S. states are currently preparing for the arrival of 17 Americans who were aboard the ship. Those Americans will first arrive at the National Quarantine Unit, a facility on the campus of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which is the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. and is designed to monitor people exposed to “high-consequence infectious diseases.”

“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement Friday. “People should know these facilities were specifically designed to prevent exposure to the public. There is no risk to the community from people being cared for in these units.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday in a statement that it sent a team of epidemiologists and medical professionals to meet the returning Americans to assess them before they fly to Nebraska.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director and acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya told CNN’s “State of the Union” that travelers will be assessed at the facility based on their risk level, and given “an offer to stay in Nebraska if they’d like.” If  the circumstances allow it, the state could “safely drive them home without exposing other people on the way, and then be put in the control … under the auspices of their state and local public health agencies.”

Bhattacharya emphasized that this was not as severe as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I don’t want to cause a public panic,” he said. “We want to treat it with our hantavirus protocols that were successful at containing outbreaks in the past.”